Director/DOP duo Blok explains ‘Multiple characters, hyper-real worlds and LOTS of set-ups was the way to go. We wanted to slap the viewer around a bit, make them work for it and leave them exhausted. So that, if they blinked, they’ve missed something. We wanted to make 2 mins 30 feel like 30 seconds – we didn’t want to waste a frame.
The prep for the promo was meticulous: every shot, camera move and transition was planned – nothing could be left to chance. We’ve had a long running relationship with The Mill, and once Sean Francis (Post Producer) saw the storyboard, he moved mountains to get it through the door. With the backing of The Mill, we were even more excited about how far we could push the visuals: we had one of the industry’s leading VFX artists involved, in Gaz Brannan. He filled us with confidence and made sure that he had everything he needed for post. Having him on set signing those elements off massively reduced the amount of time we needed to spend on these shots.
The Mill’s involvement allowed us to make not only infinitely more impactful images – like the abattoir, but we were able to tell a much better story, too. From VFX to colour, The Mill helped this promo reach its full potential and then some. We were able to do so much more with a limited time frame and a far from ideal location, because of the VFX and colour wizardry available to us.’
VFX Supervisor Gareth Brannan expands on this ‘From the start I knew this was going to be a fun project, the Blok guys had so much energy and ideas it was infectious. This film came with the usual challenges you would expect from a music video these days the main challenge been the budget, but they never let that get in the way of the film. From start to finish the film is packed with strong images and clever techniques, sprinkled with humour and a little broccoli it's a great ride of a film.
We designed interesting transitions to help the fast flow of the film and to keep the audience guessing what's coming next. We shot lots of plates so we could tile up the scenes so they would feel much bigger most notably the abattoir scene. The film is packed with little bits of post magic from the severed head to the pea face it was so much fun to work on’
Colourist Alex Gregory explains the goal behind the grade ‘The aim for everyone involved was to create a series of strong and varied looks for each of the scenes in the video. This was discussed at the storyboarding phase and both the lighting and art direction was executed with this in mind. When it came to the grade, we experimented with a variety of looks and approaches, with the intention of combining the hyper-real, and almost cartoon-like feeling of the video (vibrant, saturated and bold) with the dark, gritty and heavily dramatised looks of their references - shows such as Narcos, and various, US cop/gangster thrillers.’