Kasabian
“Reason is Treason”
Dir. Scott Lyon, 2004

It’s a music video. Made out of lots of stock footage. The twist, however, is that most of the shots have been digitally manipulated in some way to subvert the meaning of the original. So Molotov Cocktails become teddy bears, and flick knives become feathers. This meant quite a bit of work for me of course. I produced more than 30 effects shots, all of them fairly complex composites.

We had a day’s shoot where we shot lots of elements on DV against bluescreen - soft toys, silly costumes, scary masks etc. I then took the rushes and carefully comped those elements into the shots used in the video. All compositing was done in After Effects 6. The Foundry’s Keylight Keyer plugin proved to be invaluable when it came to generating clean mattes for the bluescreen elements.

We had to change some of the shots on the commercially released version as a few bits were edging into that perilous territory known as "MTV unsafe". This is the original cut with those shots restored.

Production company: Factory Films