French Canadian Director, Cinematographer and Photographer Christophe Collette created this gem from 2009- ‘Ce Soir’- a music video for the band Monogrenade.
This film reads like a well articulated dream. It makes full use of haunted yet bright empty spaces- it is neither too dark nor too sweet, yet does an artful dance between them. Collette makes excellent use of light and found objects.
The wild and rough forgotten landscape and the beautifully weathered abandoned house give it a sense of being outside of time. Casually elegant cinematography- the missing figures and floating clothes remind of the psychology of a Magritte painting. The angled glowing light is the main character and sets a lonely yet quietly portent scene, an evocative sense of longing, like an Edward Hopper. The slight staccato of the animated movements- like the static of an electric bulb, and the hovering objects and sudden appearances all lend to the poetic suspension of disbelief.
Here Christophe tells Dragon about the challenges of the marathon shoot:
This was a really low-fi shoot with multiple cameras. We used 4 Canon 5D MKII’s with Canon Series L zooms, one of the cameras was tethered to DSM, the other cameras were just working intuitively. We shot this in 4 days so you can imagine that we pretty much shot non-stop. We shot something like 10,000 pictures and edited down to a little under 2,000, the editing process could have been a lot more simple if everything had been shot with DSM that’s for sure. I did not know from the start what sort of stop-motion feeling I wanted out of the piece, I knew that in the time I had to shoot this I could have never achieved fluidity but we aimed for something that wasn’t too jerky either. My editor worked out a fantastic rhythm out of all that material and I am so grateful to him, I think he spent three weeks on the edit…
My inspiration on this was Jan Švankmajer’s Alice and the photography of Todd Hido for the darkness.
The house was the most important thing in mind at the start of the project, I needed the perfect house, because there was no art budget at all, the whole piece was shot on a 15K budget so there was no way we could afford to create a set like that one. We drove the countryside for weeks trying to find an abandoned house that I liked, we saw many, the one we selected was almost the last one we found- we had almost given up, it was in a field in a remote area in the Laurentians in northern Quebec, the windows had been covered with planks so we could not see inside the place. We looked for the owner of the house, found him and his daughter let us in. I cannot describe how amazed we were when we walked in. It was exactly what we had in mind.
The place was empty though, and I needed props, old and abandonned looking props. We decided to drive around that house to find another abandonned one with furniture inside, so we found another house, in the middle of a old cemetary, it’s the house that you see in the lake in the intro, I thought it looked better from the outside than our main house. There are a few scenes which were also shot in that house, the ones with a lot of props, but mostly we loaded a truck full of stuff, old chairs, frames, beds and mattresses, stuffed animals, etc, and brought all that over to the other house for the shoot. We were incredibly lucky to find all that, the owner for the let us do whatever we wanted in the house, even tear down walls.
The lake in the beginning is actually not a lake but a fjord in Lofoten, Norway I had shot a few months prior to the shoot. I wanted to include in the video because I loved the ruggedness of it and I thought it worked well with the house and all.
About half the shots were done with puppets, the other half with band members or actors (our cook and assistant stylist/ art director) wearing green suits. The post was done on Autodesk’s Flame by Daniel J Kelly at Motor VFX in Montreal. Dan did a tremendous job with the roto and all, the lighting was not controlled, almost all the video was shot in natural light so there was a lot of tweaking in between shots… I am very grateful to him for his contribution on this, I initially thought I would have to photoshop the whole thing or teach myself After Effects!
So it was a labor of love as you can grasp. Monogrenade is my brother’s band so I wanted to help him out a bit!
The video got an amazing amount of international attention, especially for a french canadian band. It was featured on Motionographer, Shots, Boards, on the frontpage of Vimeo and on about 500 blogs worldwide and about a dozen film festivals. It also made Mashable’s top 10 stop-motion videos on youtube.
I am mostly a cinematographer and photographer, not a director, I have worked on many projects using DSM since Ce Soir but currently I am working on commercials, all motion work, no stop-motion. I’ll let you know if I take on another adventure such as Ce Soir in the near future. I know that I would never shoot something like Ce Soir without Dragon in the future, it simplifies stop-motion a lot.
