A new live action / stop-mo music video for Australia’s Aria Award winning Gotye, entitled ‘Easy Way Out’. It was 9 months in the making with a 360° pan motion control rig by the team at Oh Yeah Wow—the ones that never take the easy way out when it comes to animating. Read on to hear from Director Darcy Prendergast and DP Andrew Goldsmith on the predominantly in-camera feats of strength.

    Darcy: I wanted to cram in as much visual trickery as possible, without it ever being front and centre. I’m a huge believer of the in camera solution and have long had an obsession with stop motion, but the piece really came into its own when resident Vis FX wizard, Andrew Goldsmith and I started experimenting.  It wasn’t long before we were creating some pretty astonishing but deliberately understated animation, some of which we would often only begin when it was almost off screen . So many of the elements in the clip, you take for granted- or simply don’t see on first watch. But when you see cockroaches crawling, coffee spilling onto the plate and the frame burning to white at the end of the clip- you start to comprehend the sheer amount of work that has gone in and then wonder how the hell these things were actually accomplished. I approached this clip with only one golden rule: Nothing should be created in a computer. All of the elements were created in camera, then masterfully assembled by the wizard. We animated the plasticine blood, the cat, the flames, the smoke-  all in stop motion with a motion control set up. Andrew then composited all these elements together. He can now tell you all about his love for Star Trek re-runs…

    Andrew: He thinks because I have glasses and love Visual FX that I automatically love sci-fi.

    Darcy: He does. He secretly wants to marry a Klingon.

    Andrew: So, anyway… Darcy’s golden rule may have been broken once or twice, but he is right to say that we tried to capture everything we possibly could in camera. Sometimes we had to fake it a little as we didn’t have time for complex rigs and wires, I often had to paint animators out of frames which meant we lost shadows and other environmental effects. These are the few things which had to be digitally reproduced, but the aim was to keep these so subtle that no one would notice them. I haven’t even told Darcy about a few of them. 

    Darcy: I did notice however, when he tried to surreptitiously composite Patrick Stewart into several scenes.

    Andrew: That never happened. The hardest part for us two creative types was working out the math of matching the live action footage (played back at 25% speed) with the stop motion stills, all while spinning 360 degrees every 30 seconds. Once that was sorted, it was a matter of clever masking (after some clever planning), rotoscoping and occasionally chroma keying.

    Darcy: There were so many times where we were literally working on the individual elements for 24 hours straight, surviving purely on the belief of the end goal. Not to mention the compositing time. The set alone, was a small house. We had lunch in it, we had naps on the bed and our actual studio fridge was painted grey put in place. We had to build the various rooms. We furnished them according to colour palette. We found the toilet in the branches of a friend’s tree. We completely tiled the bathroom ourselves without knowing how. We bought over 10,000 sheets of paper for the office. And after all of that, we burnt it all with a flamethrower for the final camera pass. 

    Andrew: Darcy was a little too infatuated with the flamethrower. I was fearing for my life.

    Darcy: Pffft… Live long and prosper.

…..What will they Wow us with next?
-Dragonframe

Credits:

Director: Darcy Prendergast

Directors of Photography:
Andrew Goldsmith & Jeremy Blode

VFX Director:
Andrew Goldsmith

Animators:
Darcy Prendergast
Seamus Spilsbury

Assistant Animators:
Josh Thomas
Jeremy Blode
Michael Greaney
Sam Lewis
Andrew Goldsmith

Costume:
Paige Prendergast

Lighting:
Shelley Farthing-Dawe
Andrew Goldsmith
Jeremy Blode

Motion Control:
Glenn Anderson

Art Direction:
Darcy Prendergast

Editor & Colourist:
Andrew Goldsmith

Rotoscoping:
Andrew Goldsmith
Josh Thomas

Sound:
Ben Matthews

Model Makers:
Michael Greaney
Josh Thomas
Benjamin Aguesse

Set Builders:
Seamus Spillsbury
David Pennay
Cody Sevedge
Benjamin Aguesse
Wes Starr
Jeremy Blode

Production Manager:
Nicky Pastore

Cardboard Flame Painters:
Fiona Dalwood
Shaun Stares
Nora Juncker
Giulia Sandri
James Bailey