Grammy nominated directors Yuval & Merav Nathan of One Wing Fly (“Her Morning Elegance”) directed this ambitious sand-animated music video, Lose This Child by Eatliz. We asked Yuval if he would tell us a bit about the production.

Yuval Nathan-

The concept of the video was to have a glance to the beach on the times that we, humans, don’t know, and through this view to discover a whole new eco system that turns back to sand as the sun rises. Having the story at night gave us a good solution of lighting the sand sculptures at the beach. The main problem with sand is the fact it is monochromatic and has a very noisy texture.

By shooting at night, we had a full control on the factors of light. And by using hard light we actually made a very defined and clear, black and white image. On the other hand, shooting outside on the summer nights created a time limitation, we had to finish a shot before sunrise. The beach is very dynamic and it is impossible to keep on creating a shot after a day. The sand on the beach is always in motion by water wind animals and humans. In total we had about 35 nights on the beach. The complex shots of the Medusa singing had to be shot in our studio, since it took more then a night per shot. The top shot of Medusa singing alone, took four days of animating.

Using Dragon
The whole video (except the 3D shot of the star dance) was shot on Dragon Stop Motion. After shooting few commercials on Dragon who were based on our previous music video “Her Morning Elegance” we knew it is a must to have this software for “Lose This Child”. We had the Dragon on a laptop, which made things very light and easy. At nights we took it to the beach (feeding the computer with a nice amount of sand) and at days, we shot with it in the studio. Using the Dragon’s image reference we were able to position the compositions that we planed in the 3D previz fast and precise. We also used it to compare the position of a character to its position in the previous shot and this way to achieve a better cut.

Best regards,
Yuval