Vanilla Twilight?
A throwback to the second go around with Owl City was for the single Vanilla Twilight. I found and except from our treatment/pitch: “We wanted to create a surreal encounter with a something strange in the sky without making it too alien. The video would follow what would basically be a conglomerate of lights floating around a town attracting the attention of locals. The lights would react to certain keys in the song by changing colors or turning on and off.”
I have fond memories of creating this music video because it was a big collaborative effort that took a handful of very talented people to create this vfx heavy video. A few days before the shoot we had a huge blizzard. It made things really difficult because of how many locations we had to shoot, but it made for a very magic video. One of our locations was Lake Erie and a lighthouse that was located there. The lake was frozen which allowed for us to actually walk out on the ice and capture some really unique shots that otherwise would have been impossible.
So you probably got to around the :35 mark and asked yourself “Wait, was that Shaq?” Well yes, yes it was. Funny story is Adam Young, aka Owl City, was a huge fan and somehow worked it out to have Shaq cameo in the spot. Unfortunately, the window to film Shaq was the day before the actual shoot started so I had to stay behind, but Steve went out with a few people and his wife. I remember him telling the story that they got there and knocked and someone answered the door letting them know that Shaq was taking a nap and they had to wait for him to wake up. Hours went by and they were loosing daylight outside. Finally Shaq arrives. Steve’s wife is cold and Shaq lets her use his jacket, which by sheer size was more of a robe on her.
Post production on this was a beast. The renders of the sky took forever. We’re talking 15 years ago and really just rendering stuff on our work computers. A lot of trial and error. I remember a lot of very late nights finishing this with Allan Stallard at Animal. I wish I had some before and after pictures of the work he did and the things we pulled off.
