Dusty Back Room.

Well here is a copy of the music video I made for my friend Simon Beeston. I would like to say its completely finished, but I basically ran out of time.
There are supposed to be six more plane shots, which in turn would have padded out the end more, and the stop frame footage of the girl in the room was supposed to be shorter and take up less time. It was just unfortunate timing that right in the middle of shooting and beginning post on it, I became one of the lead compers on a massively under quoted tv job, which took 2 months out of video making time, and my spare time......which was when I had to make the video anyway as its a freebie. That left me with little under 3 weeks to do it all, and seeing as I don't produce my time very well, I ended up spending too much time on some shots, not enough on others and none on the said six, which really would have helped the edit, because as it was I had barely enough footage to cover everything. Anyway.
I still kind of like it, but would have loved to have had another 2 months on it. But, I suppose, what are ya gonna do?
Anyway, the track is called 'Dusty Back Room' and my idea for it was based around my trips back to NZ. Everytime I go back (which now can be over a year between trips) I look thru all the things packed up into boxes and usually covered in dust. On one of these trips I found a viewmaster. I love those things. This was a few years ago now, but I had been toying with the idea of doing an animation based around the flick when you pull the lever for a while.
Simon and I also share a common love of planes (and Top Gun, haha) so I figured with the orchestral sounding track and the idea of finding things in a room, some sweet looking ww2 fighters would be a go to place as images in the viewmaster.
Being in visual fx, I mostly get to work with Cgi, and never models, so I decided to do a shoot with 1.72 model planes. I choose so small because they were easier to move the camera around, and I had to set up a blue screen studio in my spare room and that couldn't have been too big. I tracked all the planes backgrounds and the planes themselves in PF track, painted up some propellers, made a big sky texture, got some 2d cloud elements and threw them all into a 3d scene in nuke.
I never wanted the planes to look photo realistic, I always had an idea that they would look like a 1950s Godzilla movie model, or at least a bit bung but stylized.
The stop frame animation for all the stuff with the girl (the lovely Lyndall) came from the fact that I thought seeing as she was seeing moving images in a still image based toy, it might be nice to swap it around so the live action was made up of stills. I also wanted the whole thing to look a bit jumpy and not too polished. Kind of like Fantastic Mr Foxes quirky stop motion.
Anyway, I am not sure how well it worked, mainly because I have not had any distance form it yet, and I am a little sad I never got to complete it properly!