During a period of almost three weeks now (wow! Has it gone that long?!) I have being knee-deep in After Effects and Avid, making a very special Music Video. It’s not the Music Video you would come to think of, no… It’s more of a “visual aid” in the background for a band performing in Globen this Friday. The work I’ve put on this visual aid-video is probably the most extensive I have ever done.

The song, per say is a form of cover of David Bowie’s famous space ballad “Space Oddity” from 1969. The first thought that raced through my head when I got the project was basically: “Wow, 2001!” Stanley Kubrick, one of my absolute favorite directors of all time directed this Epic in 1968. Based upon Arthur Clarke’s novel, “2001: A Space Odyssey” had one very special moment that for me is equal to the closest thing you can come a “visual orgasm” on screen… The “Slit Scan Sequence”.

Created and crafted by special effects mogul Douglas Trumbull, this very sequence is probably the most psyched and most outrageous thing I ever did see. Being that I am a fan of Stanley Kubrick since many years past and that I adore all creative things cinema has given us during its over 100 years of existence, I saw the moment of opportunity and decided to create it as an inspiration for my music video. Now, making this very sequence was harder than I thought it could be… It even got to the point where I thought I would never see my precious homemade “Slit scan Sequence”. Stubborn as I am with my work, I did not give up.

The plug-ins I used for this sequence is mostly Walker Effects own “Stargate” filter for After Effects. The first render I did, rendering it to a QuickTime movie took about 6 hours to complete and it was 25 seconds long. “What do I do now?” I thought quietly for myself. Well, I decided another method involving lesser use of color filters and motion blurs, I even shorted the segments from 25 seconds to 10 seconds, give or take. Suddenly the rendering time went down from 6 hours to 45 minutes. After sitting with a slow working After Effects for a weekend you start to think for yourself: “My god, am I greedy or what?” Why didn’t I just steal the whole clip from the movie and inserted it to the video? Because I am me and creating new things is what I love most. It’s more rewarding when you do something totally alone and see it finished rather than just steal the clip and be done within a day. I like making films this way; it’s what I do…

And here we are, three weeks later and I think I can actually see the horizon slowly emerging in the very cloudy home of mine. All though not quite finished yet, I would easily say that I am probably 97% done, being that this thing needs to come up on the screen and so forth. But that’s not my problem… Not at least that I know of.

In this visual movie there is also a rendition of Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang, the reason for this is because the song lyrically is about Fuglesang but the melody is still Space Oddity… Ever heard Weird Al? Okay, then that should be enough explaining. And be able to move a person into space you need to key him out of and area, with a green screen into the movie, take the green stuff out and then move space or whatever background you feel is necessary and then you have it there. With this project he was going to take an EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) or just simply put “a spacewalk”. This was not that hard to accomplish since I already have AVID with its supreme Chroma Key-tool “Spectra Matte” and Cycore FX (Keylight) for After Effects it was pretty easy to take him out of the green sort of speak and besides, we shot him in HDV with a Sony HDV-camera making the footage clear and crisp. You could actually see the sweat from Fuglesang forehead sometimes.

Now of with the next projects!

Footnote: The famous Slit Scan Sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” can be viewed here