Short Takes

Cut-and-Paste Aesthetic for Switchfoot's "Awakening"

By Iain Stasukevich

After 10 years of making commercials and music videos, director/cinematographer Brandon Dickerson is accustomed to seeing an idea take on a life of its own. His latest video, for Switchfoot’s “Awakening,” is a good example of how a simple idea can take a radical turn.

          Dickerson developed the original concept around a process he calls “photo-mation.” The effect involves filming a subject, editing the footage into a sequence, printing out a hard copy of every frame of the edited piece, and then re-photographing those frames to create a new sequence. “Imagine if you took the 35mm motion-picture film and printed out every frame as an 81/2-by-11 print, and then you had an actor hold each printed frame and re-photographed each frame one by one,” explains Dickerson. “You could take long exposures with an open shutter in a way you wouldn’t do with a motion-picture camera. The result is you have streaks of light that you can only achieve in still photography, but the band’s performance remains in perfect sync.”
          Using footage from another Switchfoot video, Dickerson shot a series of tests with actor Tony Hale. He pitched the demo to the band, but the label went a different route for the song in question. Six months later, they called Dickerson back and asked if he was still interested in revisiting his concept for “Awakening,” only this time with a nod to the popular video game Guitar Hero. “I wasn’t familiar with the game, but they found it humorous that on tour they were always playing Guitar Hero before playing an actual gig,” Dickerson recalls. “My original idea of holding up one picture and taking a photo and repeating that expanded into this three-dimensional box that was a television, and now each frame of the video had five cutouts [one for each band member] from the original sequence. There was some serious math involved, and thousands of picture scraps to track.”
           The basic concept focuses on two men [actors Tony Hale and Adam Campbell] who meet in an elevator and then continue on to their separate homes, where they don fake tattoos and eyeliner and play a surreal version of Guitar Hero; the graphics and even the guitar controllers themselves are crafted from cardboard and paper.
           Before shooting the actors and their parts, Dickerson flew to Toronto to capture the band performing with a Panasonic HVX200. “We shot the band onstage from a variety of angles, some locked-off, some moving, but mostly static because the footage was going to become the cutouts.” In Los Angeles, the P2 media was handed over to post supervisor Michael Cioni at Plaster City Digital Post in Hollywood. Dickerson shot the narrative portion of the video, then assembled a rough cut at Plaster City with editor Jeff Stone. Placeholders were inserted where the band’s photo-mation performance would go. The band had to sign off on their performance in the cut before the photo-mation still photography could begin.
           When the go-ahead was given, Cioni and Dickerson created high-resolution QuickTimes of the Toronto performances and transcoded them into PICT sequences at 24 fps. The result was about 1,200 separate JPEG images. Although laser printing would have been more efficient time-wise, the glossy quality of the printed image wouldn’t lend itself well to the flash photography used in the photo-mation process, so the 1,200 frames were printed out on five inkjet printers that ran for almost 72 hours. Next, a team of 10 people hand-cut the band members from every frame. The time code for each frame was taped to the envelope, and the corresponding band member cutout was placed inside. “We had envelopes everywhere, and they had to take each frame and rip out every band member by hand because I wanted it to look organic,” says Dickerson. “The more handmade it looked, the better.”
           The animation was accomplished in three 10-hour days. Images were captured at a resolution of 2048x1280 using Dickerson’s personal Canon Rebel XT. When it came time to decide which frame rate to use for the photo-mation, the team agreed it would shoot 24 frames for 24 frames. After finishing the first few performance sequences. They decided to double their shots. “That enabled us to move things every frame but only change band members every other frame,” says Dickerson. “We found it looked choppier and far more hand-crafted.” On the first passes, he adds, “I was doing intricate rack focuses using a really shallow depth of field, but it looked too sexy. It was too nice.”
           Cioni notes that setting up a data-centric workflow was the key to bringing the video in on schedule. Like the Toronto footage, all of the narrative elements of the video were filmed with an HVX20 and imported directly into Final Cut Pro. The digital photo-mation images were shot in an empty studio at Plaster City, so when Dickerson finished shooting a sequence, the camera’s flash memory card was handed off to Stone, who was able to rebuild the 24p sequence almost immediately. By the last day of photo-mation photography, both Dickerson and Cioni had figured out what would work.
           Three days of printing, 1,600 man-hours of cutting, and 36 hours of photography later, Dickerson found himself with 50 seconds of photo-mation footage. “My respect for animators, particularly the old school, is through the roof, he says. “I can’t imagine the amount of patience involved.
           However, Dickerson’s biggest headache had nothing to do with the photo-mation process. Instead, it was the tapeless P2 workflow. “The P2 cards didn’t bother me, but erasing them and then reusing them freaked me out,” he recalls. “In the end, we lost nothing. Well, maybe I lost weight, but we didn’t lose any media!”
           Another reason Dickerson chose to shoot with the HVX200 was for its 24-fps capability and video-quality aesthetic. Everything was recorded in the 720pN format and then upconverted to 1080p for mastering. Since completing “Awakening,” Cioni recommends that cinematographers using the HVX200 record the image using the camera’s internally upconverted 1080i format. “At first, everybody thought shooting at 1280x720 would be better because that’s closer to the native resolution of the camera,” explains Cioni. “With the HVX, in every frame you can actually can see the compression — particularly in low light — and so you’re scaling that compression 33 percent when you up-rez to the 1080 master. The compression at 1920x1080 is less visible because even at 1080, you have the same amount of compression you have in the 720 image. The downside is you have to record 1080i, and your card economy also tanks about 40 percent.”
          “Awakening” earned its top slot on Fuse TV’s “Guilty Pleasure” Countdown, and it has found great success on YouTube, whose low-rez capability makes it difficult to tell how much work went into the photo-mation. “It’s a mixed blessing,” says Dickerson. “The response has been great, but it’s bizarre to know what poor quality people are watching it on.”
           Now that he has experimented with HD, Dickerson would like to use it again, albeit wit a little more support. “I’ve been shooting film professionally for 10 years, and it took the right project to go to a tapeless HD workflow,” he says. “This is the first project where I kind of let go of all the ways I’d been doing things. Going from film cans to ones and zeroes isn’t easy.”

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