'I usually have a very scientific approach to shooting the shots exactly as they were story boarded. With this video we did not have time to do that and I could not afford to go into that kind of exactness. Instead we set up these situations that would be very rich for the cameras'. -Nic Mathieu
Interview with director Nic Mathieu and VFX supervisor Chris Brown.
MVW: How did you write the treatment for 'Fiction'?
Nic Mathieu: Well, it was a pretty unusual situation because the band just had a vague concept. They knew that from the lyrics of the song “she dreams in digital” that it would feature a girl and it would have to be high tech. There were a lot of ideas that were being thrown around and the ones we decided to keep evolved tremendously from their original state. The first two drafts were almost completely different than what we ended up with. The band came up with the idea of what they wanted and I wrote a treatment. Right after it was turned in I got the job but I felt like I needed to put more thought into it. I came back the next day and told everyone that I changed everything. It was still the same basic idea, but the whole video became vertical as she goes down through the elevator.
MVW: What was involved in shooting the set of the girl in the water?
NM: She had “prosthetic” paneling on her body, which allowed us to plug the cables into her. Steve Johnson’s company XFX created the makeup. They did a terrific job. The make up work was took nine hours to apply. She had to go through this grueling process two of the three days of shooting.
We basically had her in a sarcophagus, which is what you see at the beginning of the video. The camera is upside down so everything was shot right side up as she was being levitated from the water. She is actually lying down on a type of board and there are wires going up to pulleys. The system was put together by the grips in about 40 minutes. It was an incredible job putting the scene together. The water in the opening scene was very manageable because it was in a container although it leaked occasionally.
MVW: The heavy rain falling on her as she stands up in the sarcophagus is visually stunning.
NM: We had a one ton tank above her head that was meant to overflow so that the water would rain on all sides. All the elevator motion is an illusion and of course the set was static. The camera is doing all the movement and a lot of “compositing” was done to move the backgrounds behind her. All the wide shots that you see of the elevator going down are “comp” shots.
Originally I had complex demands for this elevator set. I wanted the background to move behind the set. We ran out of time to build this and at the last minute we had to improvise.
Chris Brown: We essentially shot for three days and filmed a lot of footage. We had a model unit shooting in the corner of the stage and then the main unit was with Nic the whole time. The last day of the shoot lasted about 20 hours. We had three different sets going at the same time with people building at one end of the stage and two units shooting at the other end. It was a hectic last day!
MVW: How did you accomplish the wide shots of the elevator scenes?
NM: These were all shot as miniatures. This wonderful guy, Patrick Lee, who is a great model maker, created the model. He built the model at a smaller scale than would have been ideal, but that’s what we could afford. The Director of Photography, Pieter Vermeer managed to give us great depth of field on the model and made it into this huge room that you see. We pillaged the miniature background and used it everywhere in the video. It was flipped and flopped every which way we could because it was the most intricate looking piece of production design that we had. We even comped some of the miniature walls on top of the real sets to add detail.
MVW: Towards the end of the video she has strands of cloth billowing around her.
NM: It was a very simple wire trick. We had about 12 guys around her standing on ladders holding the cloth in the air. With wire tricks you often can either see them or see where the cloth is being help up in the air. To avoid this we had them wave and beat their arms around so that the contact wire points were always moving. We had a huge ten foot tall fan that was blowing through all the cloth, plus two other fans in the back that were making the movement of the cloth very chaotic. These were all shot at 150 frames per second to give it a languid look.
I usually have a very scientific approach to shooting the shots exactly as they were story boarded. With this video we did not have time to do that and I could not afford to go into that kind of exactness. Instead we set up these situations that would be very rich for the cameras. The lights were part of the set and the water was there to give us interesting reflections and textures. There were six hours allotted to shoot this scene and we spent four of those six hours setting it up. Finally we had only two hours to shoot the scene with two cameras and dozens of angles.
MVW: What about the scene where the band is playing with the plexi glass around them and the green mass of data flying around?
NM: I did all those shots myself. I knew exactly what I was going after in terms of the look of that data and I figured it would be faster to do it myself. Actually the comping of the data was fun, it was not a very painful thing. I created 3D cylinders and mapped the data on to them then track it into every shot.
MVW: I really loved the scene where she creates the robots standing on the walls.
CB: Those were a combination of elements. We worked with Steve Johnson to create a look for the pixel army guy. A mask and a body piece were built for the guy that Nic choose. We created a 3D character from the practical guy that was then put into some of the other shots.
NM: That was a real guy and a real interesting prosthetic effect. We wanted to remove his eyes and nose. Traditionally they would put patches of make up over the eyes to build them out. They said that if we wanted to remove the nose they would have to make a cast and create an entire replica of his face. They then sculpted out the nose and reapplied this on top of the guy’s face. The mask took four hours to apply and the poor guy could barely breath and was totally blind. He was then put under hot lights and filmed for two hours. The 3D models were only used for medium and wide shots. I thought that using a real guy would give us the look we wanted for the close ups. You can literally see the creases in his lips and the pores in his skin. It really makes you wonder why this guy does not have a face? I thought that getting a real guy paid off. It was pretty painful for him but he was a real trooper.
MVW: Near the end of the video she becomes a robot herself.
NM: That was probably the most challenging effects shot. Originally we were going to use a robotics mask over her head. When we started working with the shot in post we realized that it would be easier to recreated the head in 3D because the tracking would have been such a nightmare. What we ended up doing was a full 3D shot. The robot head itself is 3D and her face splitting apart is a 3D element. The full CG shot was four weeks of intense modeling and very complicated animation to hide those panels. Basically we had a texture map of her face that was photographed and reapplied on top of the 3D model. This gave us all the freedom to do that movement.
The artist who did the last shot, Johnny Banta, is a very talented guy. He literally walked in and pulled up the 3D scene on his laptop. I thought it was a simplified version and that he would need to take it back home to his big SGI station to make the changes, instead he did them right there on his laptop and re-rendered it on the spot.
MVW: Overall, what was it like to work with the band on the project?
NM: They were open to going all the way with something really creative and crazy. It was difficult for everyone to get their heads around exactly what we were going to do. It was such a far out visual world that didn’t really have any basis in reality. The biggest challenge was getting everyone to understand where we were going for and agreeing on that. They were really collaborative.
Credits:
Production Company: No Prisoners
Director: Nic Mathieu
VFX supervisor: Chris Brown
Inferno Artist: Christopher Jones / Radium
Director of Photography: Pieter Vermeer
Offline editor: Nic Mathieu
Colorist: Paul Bronkar/525 Studios
Inferno Artist: Christopher Jones / Radium