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Florist - Sci-fi Silence

 I was recently tapped to produce all the Compositing work for the music video for Florist’s new single, “Sci-fi Silence,” which included 6 full minutes of footage spanning 31 shots.

I was brought in to set supervise the shoot so after we had set up and rattled off the first few test shots, I was able to bring those in and ensure they were looking good and that we were able to pull a good key. It also allowed me to place tracking markers where they needed to be, help make lighting/camera decisions, etc. It was my first time working with Director Vanessa Haddad and Cinematographer Adam Gundersheimer and it couldn’t have gone better. We were able to capture everything we needed in a single day which included some additional elements of each band member in case we wanted to comp together the band in various angles.

During Post Production, there were quite a few small challenges that reared their heads. While the Blackmagic Ursa G2 delivered 4k footage, the noise level meant everything had to be passed through a pretty aggressive denoiser before keying that killed a bit of detail. Luckily that detail would have been softened anyway once we applied the glow levels we wanted. Another factor was that the lens we used, which was a beautiful vintage zoom, caused some heavy vignetting and halation which interfered with the keys a bit, and had such an incredibly shallow depth of field that the tracking markers I’d placed in the background were practically unusable for any close-ups. That being said, these are the elements of the lens that lend the final image its beautiful quality. The final factor that made this a bit more complicated was the fact that we were determined to deliver the project at the full 4k size (3840x2160 considering its 4:3 aspect ratio). Considering that the first and last shots of the piece are also 2 minutes long by themselves, it meant tracking, keying, camera moves, animation, and rendering were made all the more difficult and ended up being the real bottleneck all the way up to delivery.

Barring those minor issues, the simplicity of the shots and moves meant a lot of work was able to be reused during repeat shots with just a small tracking tweak. In the end, these slow, meditative moments that are relatively devoid of action best convey the void of space that the song captures.

Note: Planets, Opening Titles, and Shooting Star elements created by Corey Ellis

Pitchfork: Florist Share Video for New Song “Sci-Fi Silence”: Watch
Stereogum: Florist - “Sci-fi Silence”