Dropping-feathers-224x127Egil Pedersen directed the music video for Ruggged Wilderness & Mountain Man No More's track "Dropping Feathers," and uses some clever post-production tricks that tell the story in a very organic way. Shot on a Canon 5D Mark II in Norway, the stark black-and-white aesthetic of the video subtly incorporates excellent After Effects work:

Via planet5D, Pedersen shares how they achieved the distorted faces in post-production:

The idea to this video came to after I saw an After Effects tutorial from the great Andrew Kramer at videocopilot.net. The method he used was to first stabilize a video by tracking points in the faces, then pre-compose the layer and then make a whip from the data in the pre-comp to the layer in the original comp (if you’re not into AE, this has absolutely no meaning to you). The goal is to undo the stabilize effect in the original comp, it will still be present in the pre-comp. If you now add an effect to the original layer (I used liquify to destort the faces) the effect will follow the movement of what you tracked and stabilized.

[via planet5D]

Thanks to Karla for pointing out that you can see a similar technique in the video for Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks:"

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Editing & Post-Production