When one of my roommates moved to LA to pursue a full-time screenwriting career, I used the following criteria to choose a new roommate: "which among our applicants is the most talented filmmaker?" Instead of shooting stills of my Brooklyn apartment I had shot a walkthrough video on my RED (it was sitting on my desk so it was actually easier than taking a bunch of photos, but... most overkill apartment video ever!) and so there were a lot of people to choose from. Paul Trillo, it turned out, had seen me speak at the Vimeo festival and I had backed his Kickstarter campaign, even though we'd never met, so the choice was easy. Paul moved in and promptly shot this lovely music video on his Canon 7D:


From The Peach Kings' latest EP, Handsome Moves.

Shot with the Rokinon 14mm Lens (there's a newer Cine version) on the Canon 7D with the Technicolor Cine Profile. Paul used AE Keylight (ships with After Effects) for chroma keying and Knoll Light Factory for the lens flare. Paul said he did "a little bit of optics compensation to correct the 14mm distortion and then optics distortion reapplied as a universal adjustment layer. The camera movement was just a lot of tweaking and tweening in the AE graph editor."

I asked Paul to do a VFX breakdown video as I thought he did an excellent job of making the end result look deceptively simple; I knew there was a lot going on when his estimated After Effects render time was 25 hours! We loaded the AE project file on my Hackintosh and it was able to tackle the music video in "only" 4 hours.

I should also mention that Paul is a fellow member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective (more on that soon).

While there is considerable technical wizardry on display here, my favorite thing about the video is the use of blue/green suits and how Paul was able to utilize them to embody the idea of loneliness: I find the keyed-out figures to be a very effective demonstration of the lack of someone's presence. To me it's a great example of the technology serving the art and not vice versa. Thoughts of your own?

Links: The Peach Kings, Paul Trillo (Vimeo)