The Goodluck Assembly, an Ottawa based rock band, contacted us with quite an interesting project proposal in spring of 2011. They wanted what many know today as a “viral video” for their song Tastebuds. For those unfamiliar with the term, it is basically a video which is produced in hopes of being spread by viewers due to their liking of the video. Obviously, it is no simple task to just sit down and think of a video that is going to go viral. It took many meetings between the band and ourselves to come up with even a base concept. However, after lots of hard work and creative thinking, we came up with the concept of a “forward moving reversed video”. Confused yet?
Our concept was was basically based around a character who is set in a world where the physics as we know on earth does not apply. In a simple description, the main character moves forward while everything around him moves backwards. How did we do this? Simple. For each scene we had our actor walk backwards and had events going on in the background in normal motion. In editing, we then reversed the footage so that it appeared that he was walking forward, and the events in the background appeared to be happening in reverse. This made for many challenges as we basically had to make our minds think in reverse for each shot that we wanted to produce.
On top of having to do everything in reverse, we wanted to make the video so that it was continually flowing. This means that the whole video almost seems like it is done in “one shot”. To do this, we used a variety of transitions from one scene to the next such as going into a white wall in one scene, and coming down from a white sky in another. This is a fairly simple concept preformed in many web videos, however once you incorporate the reverse aspect, it becomes a lot more confusing. In order for a scene to end off with a transition, it required us to start filming that scene from the ending transition and end filming at the beginning transition since the footage would later be produced.
As I’m sure you can tell, the project was a lot of work and definitely kept our minds flowing. It proved to be a great learning experience for all of us though and we look forward to working with The Goodluck Assembly on future projects such as this one. The finished product can be seen below!