A Very cold sTudio
Here is a throwback to our third time working with The Devil Wears Prada. The song is called Assistant to the Regional Manager. Funny enough I found the writeup we shared pitching what we’d like to do with the video. Pitch decks and treatments have come a long way to say the least. But we also had a good relationship with the band so they knew what we were bringing to the table from past videos.
The Pitch >>
The video will not have a traditional story line but rather strong, abnormal, dark and questionable images/scenes. We will be creating fictional characters that will be placed within dark, cold, industrial environments.. The characters will do different things in the environments based on the surroundings. Their actions, situations and props will be strange, not morbid, avoiding the cliches we discussed. The scenes will be created based off of the attached references as well as others that we are collecting. These scenes will all be filmed in a stop-motion technique, which will add to the surrealism and give the footage a chaotic feel without making it jarring.
Along with the scenes we create using characters, we'll also create scenes using different props that will help serve the overall aesthetic. The props will not just be stale shots, but strange things will happen to the props.
This is more of a vague treatment, but a lot of what we'll be doing is hard to explain and will be less convincing on paper. We intend to make this very unique. Overall, this will feel more like dark artistic photography than a metal video.
The performance will be filmed in a similar stop motion style. We will shoot each band member individually in different scenes, which will also be the dark, cold, industrial settings. The lighting will be a one source, soft light from the front of each band member. Each band member will be filmed from overhead. We will do two separate profile shots of Mike and Jeremy for their vocals, along with their overhead shots. The profile shots can be silhouette with a strobe that will light their faces. The performance will compose around 20-25% of the video.
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We had hired two people to play the roles of the characters you see in the video. Jay Morrisey shaved his entire body for the role, eyebrows included. The female was a performer we know who was amazing at contortion and acrobatics. And it was cold. The sound stage was not heated and the two of them were naked except for a few pieces of canvas cloth. There is a shot of Jay in an old tile bathroom around 2:20 and he's shaking - that was because of the temperature, not because we gave him that direction (sorry Jay!). Dan Thomson at Visionary Effects handled wardrobe and makeup.
The b-roll was just random things we owned and found that had a beautiful and dark quality to them. I remember huddling in the basement of our studio for days lighting and filming these found objects.
In post we just got weird and ignored the rules ;)
