Giovanni Sollima - Sogno ad Occhi Aperti (Daydream)

Lasse Gjertsen writes:

So this is the project I've been working on for the last 5 months, and heres how part 1 of it is made:

On the six arms parts, which by the way took most of the time to make, I filmed Sollima playing the different layers of cello after each other. I then edited the video frame by frame in Photoshop (remember, it's 25 frames per second of video), cutting his arms out from the other layers and pasting it on top, matching the movement of the cello. This was done ca 4000 times, by myself.

The clouds were actually filmed in my backyard, sped up 1250 times. The birds we're filmed in my town, Larvik, Norway on clear blue sky, so that I could use blue screen keying to put them on top of the clouds. It's hard to notice, but the birds are moving in half speed slow motion. I also had to stabilize the motion of the birds, since I filmed it with handhelt camcorder. The sequence was cut together using After Effects and Premiere.

The forest, river sequence was photographed in a forest in Arona, Italy. I took a picture ca. every five meters, and morphed the images together using WinMorph, matching the pace of the music.

The zooming sequence is very hard to explain. Basically, the first 8 seconds after it starts zooming and when you see Mr Sollima's face is real photos. The rest inbetween are "painted" in Photoshop by me.

The rest of this part is merely editing in Premiere and After Effects. Allright!

Part 1

We went out into this very weird forest outside Milan, Italy, 5 in the morning to catch the morning fog. Then we just started filming, nothing planned except which song to play :P SO most of this is merely experimenting with angles and editing. People have asked me how I made the background. "Uhm, it's a real forest..?" Spooky atmosphere..

The part were the "camera" follows the bow is made with After Effects.

The last part was filmed at a concert in Italy.

Part 2

"Reality" TV Editing

My personal input on the matter has changed very drastically since the day I met a nice gentleman that is a TV and film editor. He worked for a few years as an editor on a couple of America's very popular reality shows and had many stories about how he and his crew changed the outcome of a real situation just for the extra ratings and interest of the scene... Even though reality television is fun to watch, we have to just take it with a grain of salt for it's really not real...but I'm sure you already knew that... :p

Here is a great piece by England's Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe on Reality TV Editing

Heavy Metal Baghdad

In 2003, just after the US toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein, Vice magazine published an article on the only heavy metal band in Iraq, Acrassicauda. The Baghdad-based band was formed in the last few years of Saddam's rule and aside from the typical problems every band has, they also had to deal with the stigma of playing dark western music in an Islamic state under Baath party rule, while coming out of a decade of war, sanctions, and poverty. We found their story inspiring. When we interviewed the band they were excited to be living in a newly freed Iraq, and their future seemed limitless. They even talked of recording an album. Things took a turn for the worse, however. After a few months respite, the situation in free Iraq deteriorated quickly and by the end of the year, after a few key insurgent attacks‑the bombing at the UN building, the massive strike at the grand Shi'a mosque in Najaf‑Iraq started to unravel. We stayed in touch with the band through this time and in the fall of 2006, with the insurgency reaching a fevered pitch, VICE Co-Founder Suroosh Alvi and VBS Producer Eddy Moretti decided to visit them.

The following 5 short videos are a very interesting and internal look at the state of Baghdad and what people have to go through on a daily basis...