A Radiohead riff reformatted to a cutout-motion existence where an artful dodger deftly dubsteps his way toward your entertainment. Blac Ionica’s opening for Russell Howard’s Good News, sets us right for human folly and a chuckle.
A production breakdown with Creative Director CHRIS STRONG of Blac Ionica.
CS: It initially started off by being a very ambitious live action shoot with Russell that involved projections and giant props that we would’ve made ourselves, however we soon realised that this idea was probably a bit too ambitious and really impractical for the time and the budget given.
Therefore we developed this secondary idea, which was still in the spirit of the original idea, but physically scaled down to a manageable tabletop size. In the end we think that this chosen route actually made for a more unique looking piece of work – and because of the mixture of techniques it has a really interesting quality to it… hopefully increasing it’s longevity. From the outset with this project we’d hoped that it would be the sort of piece of work that people (the audience) would pick up on new bits of detail each time they watched it.
Storyboard images
We shot one sequence with Russell in an empty white studio. Designed and printed out other elements (speech bubbles, logo sandwich board, arrows, newspapers etc) along with the selected stills of the shoot with Russell. Mounted it all up onto foam board. Rented some props, some lights and lenses. Made a tabletop white cove with some white formica. Shot it over a non-stop period of 2 days. We then took the rushes into After Effects and tidied them up, tweaked colours and levels. Got a rough cut signed off by the client. Began the lengthly task of retouching and incorporating additional CGI props. Composited it altogether. Gave it all a final grade.
Productions images
The other thing was that down to lack of space and a limited budget we could only afford to set it all up on a small table, which meant that rather than using a dolly track and a long table, we actually had to animate the pan along. This meant that for every frame everything in the shot had to be moved 1mm by hand to the left. However in the end we feel that this also added to the charm of the piece.
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