Branching out.

When I first moved back here to Los Angeles a few months ago, I had planned on taking time off for a few weeks to relax and work on my film. The boxes hadn't even been unpacked and I got a random call from Motion Theory to work on a new music video for Beck. The weird thing for me was that it didn't involve animation- they wanted me to design and build a set! It was a really unique job- to build a miniature version of city street out of found objects that would blend into a flea market scene. Motion Theory has a really cool technique that is based on the back cover fold-ins from MAD magazine. Using motion control and digital compositing they manage to "fold" a video image to reveal something new and unexpected. So for the set I designed- it would look like a normal flea market scene in East LA until the fold-in happens and then the boxes reveal themselves to be a miniature street. The actual build took about a week and had my wife Cindy and I running all over LA gathering stuff from thrift stores to build with. We picked up some really fun stuff- look for the matador painting in the final shot (that was one of Cindy's big finds!).

When you are done looking at my images below be sure to go here to see behind the scenes and watch the video! I'm a huge fan of Beck, and was really proud to work on this. (Got to meet him too!)

Here is the rough sketch I did to show the idea:



And here's a photo I took on the day of the shoot: