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The first meetings of the ALLUME Prod. team with the Wildpath band in order to precisely define the mood of the music video. Out of these meetings is born the idea of using paper as a thread all along the story.

This is about making the setting all in cut and folded paper. These crafted elements in miniature can be added as backgrounds to scenes shot with a green screen through chroma keying. The storyboard is drawn and the shooting script is polished as much as possible in order to be efficient on set.

The last workshops include Loïc Guilpain, cameraman, Margot Le Lorier, professional editor, Adrien Le Lorier, photography director and Marie Gombeaud-Antoine, chief makeup artist. These work sessions are nessecary in order to develop any technical solution and represents the last steps before shooting.

Thanks to the money collected with the Ulule project, the music video shooting unfolds over two intense days in studio. During 48 hours, over 25 people work together facing a race against the clock in order to achieve 90 shots (ie 95% of the video). The scenes are shot in front of a green screen and the set is digitally added in the post-production phase.

The green screen gives difficulties to actors who have to constantly picture the final set and consider it in the way they play their part. The film crew regularly gives them indications about their moves, their looks and their interactions with their environment.

The exercise is also complex for the production team. This is about taking care of lighting and composing the frame as fast as possible, while anticipating post-production problems. But the challenge is taken up and the shooting is completed.

The paper models were crafted with care by the band members, film directors and a few gifted volunteers. The shooting of these models is used as set, digitally replacing the green screen on the shots made in studio. These landscapes in miniature are also shot by a smaller team: only the two directors.

The advantage of a miniature studio is that holding out an arm is enough to change the lighting of the set. Indeed, everything is simpler in miniature. Unlike the way a classic set is lit up, this is about cleverly composing the lighting to make models looking credible enough.

But the highest difficulty of this shooting lies in matching light, angle and scale with pictures previously shot at the green screen studio. After numerous tests, the team gets convincing results.

The additional outlook of an actual editor is essential to make a proper music video. He is more objective about the rushes and focuses on rhythm, aesthetics and semantics of the shots.

Margot Le Lorier, professional editor for television, takes care of this job using the Avid software. She is skilled and gifted to naturally put rhythm into video.

The stakes are high. These rushs, as raw as they were shot with green screen, don’t help much to picture the final video mood. This makes difficult to select what is essential and what is not. Margot still takes up the challenge. Besides she will work on the music video making of that she mainly shot by herself.

This step is the longest and the most complex in the making of the video. The post-production is made by the directors duo. Yann Philippe is in charge of process management and Edouard Mahier assists him with technical implementation. The shots can be classified in 5 categories named this way:

“Chroma keying shots”: Most part of the work consists in chroma key compositing to stream paper set with green screen footage. A proper example is any shot taking place in the forest. Furthermore, all shots corrections are completed with other processes: lighting adjustments and colour grading.

“Band shots”: corrections still lies in chroma keying except this time the set is not all-paper. This is also about digitally removing the instruments brands and changing the drums colour (turning red into blue). At last, a computer generated light which varies according to music is added to make pictures more dynamic.

“Model shots”: those ones are only made up of paper elements in miniature, without any life-size characters. The main modifications lie in background corrections or enriching paper props and set. This is the case for the shot showing the witch’s house on fire.

“Organic shots”: those rushes are called this way because they do not include neither paper models nor green screen. Most of them are close-ups involving slight corrections. Some perfect examples are the shots showing torches to which sparkles are simply added.

“Complex shots”: They are part of the most difficult ones to process, especially because there is hardly any existing footage to work on. In other words, those shots are made from scratch. They are composed of visual effect, fragments of video extracts, model photos, computer generated lights and artificial 3D cameras. In this case, only the first (mountains) and the last shot (underwater) are concerned.