1. FEEDER – TRACING LINES

Feeder – Tracing Lines – my second best ever vid from Robin Schmidt on Vimeo.

Before launching into the how of this video, it’s worth doing a little backstory into the why. The music video industry in the UK is so utterly hideous. It’s like this: there’s no money for the work, it’s insanely competitive, there are a lot of incredibly talented people, and the commissioning process is a total c***. Then there are the expectations. ‘Sorry we have no money but would you please completely f*&k yourself to get this video made to the same standard as one costing ten times as much, in one week please. No pressure. Oh yes, if we don’t like it, we won’t pay you and you’ll never be commissioned by us again. Oh, and if you do a good job that we like we will of course go to a different director next time as we won’t want the next one to look anything like this one. You do understand don’t you? By the way, we loved your treatment but have given it to a different director to make as we liked a video he did for another artist and think he’d do a better job, good luck with everything.’ Music videos are a great way to learn your trade as an aspiring director because they place restrictions on you going so far beyond the normal call of duty that if you can survive (or even thrive) you know you’re in very good shape. The whole industry is full of bullshit, bullshitters, haters, morons, players, idiots, hangers on, cretins, users, abusers, f&*^wits, risk-averse, safe-playing cockends and I hate it. Producers in particular are forced into raping talent and crew to make budgets work and burn most of the relationships they have in the process. Stay away!

I didn’t. When I started out I was really lucky in finding a commissioner who believed in me and would pick me preferentially over other directors because he trusted me. But, in my defence, I’d earned it. Videos like Undercut’s ‘A bit of education’ nearly killed me, but they earned me awards nominations (didn’t win any though, did I!?) and I built a career on the hard work. This same commissioner helped launch Feeder, a pretty prominent UK rock band, back in the day and I always said I’d take shitty budget jobs for this commissioner if he got me a Feeder gig. As it happens, at the time of this video, Feeder had just changed management and hired my commissioner who promptly got me to pitch on ‘Tracing Lines’.

Three other directors had already pitched on the song and he didn’t like any of the ideas. What I didn’t know was that one of those directors had already gone into preproduction and been involved in long discussions with the lead singer Grant. More on that later. Feeder are a three piece rock band and tend to look a bit miserable in their videos so I wanted to do something that was stripped down, back to performance, but with a twist. When building your career as a music video director, performance setups are your stock in trade and it’s pretty hard these days to find anything new to do. I’d seen a video where a guy layered up lots of different takes of the same material over each other, which he called motion cubism and thought it might be fun to extend that idea. In a nutshell the idea was this: three EX1s shooting simultaneously against green screen, one from the front, one from the left, one from the right, would capture head on and profile shots in different sizes (wide, mid, cu etc). Those 2D flat layers would then be put together in After Effects like those big cardboard cutouts you see in malls in the shape of a big cross (except these would be way more complex). Then the plan was to fly the virtual camera in AE around the shots, seeing pretty much every take at the same time, to create a fluid, dynamic, impossible video that did its best not to get boring. As the camera approached I’d dissolve to the mid shot and then to the CU so we always had a decent resolution version of the person to look at. I shot each band member individually trying to capture a sense of fun more than anything else, and really the shoot day was pretty relaxed. For the first time ever I think you see Grant smile in a video, and many of the comments on Youtube said just that, so at least I achieved something of what I was after!

That just left the post. And then I stopped sleeping.

Assembling the grand 3D model of the band, placing them in space, and layering up all the different takes so they sat in the right place was actually kind of fun, but bear in mind that every single layer had to be keyed before I could see how they all fit together. Keying is incredibly hard. If you think you can just shoot against green, apply a filter and hey presto it’s gone, then you are sadly mistaken. One of the biggest issues is spill (where the green light from the screen is reflected in lighter areas like skin, or a cymbal) and there’s nothing worse than green tinged skin, or fringing so I deliberately made the video black and white to avoid that issue. If you’re working on one shot at a time then fine, take the time to tweak the settings, but when you have over a thousand shots then it gets a little nauseating. The band also have quite a lot of chrome on their instruments. Grant’s guitar is a beautiful old Fender Jazzmaster, but that chrome is hideous for reflecting the green. So we used Keylight, picked the colour, then pretty much left it like that, with a few master tweaks.There were between 60 and 100 layers going on at any given time. Yes, you can precomp to a certain extent but when you’re constantly dissolving between layers as you fly around, you actually need to have them all there ready to look at and decide which one you want. I’ve included a grab of my AE timeline just to give you an idea.

Labelling is of course incredibly important but honestly, after a couple of hours it’s excruciatingly difficult to tell between L, R, F on a shot that’s, in every other way, completely identical. I was assembling this all on my old G5 Quad, a computer I won’t have a single bad word said against as it was the best I’ve ever had. But this was a step too far. Even using proxies, even with all resolution set to the lowest possible level, it would still take twenty minutes to RAM preview a four second clip. When you’re dealing with complex animation involving lots of layers you need to be able to tweak the moves quickly, see how they’re working, tweak again, move on. I believe in giving myself a challenge, and I knew how to do this, but doing it at this speed was agonising. Which brings me back to the bullshit of the industry. This was a music video for Feeder, a known band, that would get seen. Do a good job on this and I’d be able to pitch on bigger budget videos etc. This was a potential career maker. That meant pressure, big big big pressure. So, I agonised over every shot, every transition, every little tweak of the camera. Killer. I didn’t sleep at all for two weeks. After Effects is fantastic, but actually for doing this kind of incredibly precise camera work it’s a bit of a shit and I kept cocking up my camera moves by just a tiny fraction, pacing and banking being essential parts of the process and fixing those kind of problems when you’re staring at draft resolution proxies that give you nothing but gigantic pixels, is a real challenge. Put simply, this was just too ambitious for the equipment I was using.

The final piece of the puzzle was the chorus work and I actually handed the motion graphics over to my friend Andy Needham, a graphic designer who did a great job with all the red patterns. I should also mention that I did a full grade on the video, making it really contrasty, spending a day and a half on it, and doing the right work on every single shot, but when we assembled the video it looked utterly shit, so we went back to the lightly desaturated look I’d initially done when assembling all the layers. Arse. Those kind of decisions really kill you when you’re chronically sleep-deprived.

I’m really pleased with the video, it got a great big writeup in promo news, and I was intimately involved in so much of making it happen on my own. However, when the song was released nobody saw it. The director who was initially pencilled to make the video got the hump in a massive way and started slagging me off to people around the industry. The video didn’t get me any more work. I did do some bigger budget videos after that, but the experience basically taught me that you can work as hard as you like in music videos and it really means f&*k all at the end of the day. The artist gets all the recognition, the label doesn’t care about you and you’re back to square one. Yes, they can be fun, but I’d much rather take that credit myself and enjoy some steady upwards in my career so I walked away from music videos to make drama and that’s where you’ll find me now. Much happier!