Photomation

Brandon Dickerson invented a new technique called photomation to showcase Switchfoot's latest song in a music video.

by Michael Fickes

By the time he got to the 635th photograph of the 1,200 photographs he had to snap, Brandon Dickerson began to wonder what he had gotten himself into. “We were killing ourselves, and only a handful of people would understand what we had gone through after seeing the production,” says Dickerson, a director with Boom, a production company with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Dickerson’s recently completed project is an innovative and playful music video for alt-pop band Switchfoot. Starring Tony Hale (Stranger Than Fiction, Arrested Development), Adam Campbell (Epic Movie), and Jayma Mays (Heroes, Ugly Betty), the piece features the band playing Awakening (under the Sony/BMG label), while cutting among scenes of the three stars, each in their own apartments, playing a video game called Guitar Hero.

Guitar Hero is played with a giant guitar joystick – call it the joy-guitar. So we see the stars playing their joystick guitars and controlling the video game, to the music of Switchfoot’s Awakening.

Dickerson constructed an abstract, made-up Guitar Hero video game screen using a technique that he calls photomation. Using inkjet printers, he printed every frame pf a 50-second segment of Switchfoot’s performance – exactly 1,224 frames. Then Dickerson and nine other people spent 16 hours carefully tearing the paper frames apart, making a separately torn piece of paper for each band member shown in each frame. Each piece of paper left a margin of roughly torn edges around the images.

Next, they organized the images by time code, placed them in a cardboard box called the “performance space,” and spent 38 hours photographing each of the 1,224 frames of the 50-second performance segment.

Finally Dickerson added in-camera effects including light flashes and foam lightning bolts in sync with the track. He created a QuickTime map of the music so that the elements would hit on the beat of the music.

Overall, the piece has the feel of a project devised by high school kids ditching school and messing around with dad’s camera equipment in the garage.

“I had pitched a photomation idea with Tony Hale to the bank a couple of years ago,” Dickerson says. “For this project, they brought me the idea of a Guitar Hero player, and we combined the photomation concept with that. The idea was to have two guys playing Guitar Hero against each other – each in his own apartment – and the gal playing the game herself – also by herself in her own apartment.

Dickerson produced the piece in two stages. First came the basic shooting. He traveled to Toronto as a crew of one and shot the band at a stop on a recent tour.

Then he shot ear of the three stars playing Guitar Hero.

Then he built the photomation.

The tough part to shoot – and to explain – is the photomation, which resembles claymation in that the photomation shoots scenes one frame at a time. After each shot, a claymation shooter builds a new scene, with the clay sets moved “forward” 1 / 30th or 1 / 24th of a second, depending on the shooting format. With photomation, the shooter builds new scenes out of printed frames of the actual shoot, photographs the scene, and then moves the scene forward for the next shot.

“We shot 24p High Definition,” Dickerson says. “That was great because it saved us six frames per second, which was a big help.”

With photomation, the director shoots the live action, exports the video to QuickTime, and prints each frame individually. “This part took forever,” Dickerson recalls. “We had five inkjet printers going at once. We couldn’t use large laser printers because they produce a glossy finish and we needed a matte finish so that we could take flash photographs of the frames.

The frames showed the Switchfoot band together on stage. After tearing the printed paper-frames apart – separating the images of the individual members of the band – Dickerson built a large shoebox shaped carton and positioned the images of the band-members inside the carton as if they were on stage. The time code recorded on each image kept everything straight, for all 1,200 frames that had to be photographed.

Why go to all this trouble? Why not build the stage with torn pieces of paper and them composite images from each frame onto the paper? “To get the organic and unfinished effect that we wanted, each paper had to have a unique rip pattern to it,” Dickerson says. “In addition the depth of field would look completely different. We also wanted to make sure that it didn’t look too slick, as if it had been done on a computer. We intentionally built this organic or unpolished look.

“In addition, it is all completely in sync. The musician on one piece of paper is aligned with each of the others, and when the drummer hits the cymbal in one image, the bass guitar is exactly in sync.

Despite Dickerson’s fears that only a handful of people would understand the complex photomation technique employed in the production of Awakening, 900,000 viewers have flocked to see it on YouTube. The piece also soared to number one on the Fuse channel.

Maybe the viewers don’t understand it. But they like it.

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