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 New York-based
artist Cesar Kuriyama has been receiving a lot of attention lately for a
music video he directed for the band Fat City Reprise. He made the
unusual decision to shoot the whole project with a still frame camera,
ending up with 45,000 images. Every one of those shots went through
Fusion.
We spoke with Cesar recently about his video: Long Gone, by Fat City Reprise. Click on the image below to view the video.
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What do you love most about your work?
I like to do thins I've never seen before. It seems that every day there's at least a dozen new video projects being posted on the web showcasing the best new stuff in motion graphics. It all inspires me and gives me ideas for techniques and visual experiments.
How did you get the job of directing this video?
It was just luck, really. I had decided to make a music video in my spare
time to show off my directing chops. I gathered up all the music I could
find from friends who were in bands. And I walked around Brooklyn listening to all their music... but nothing
clicked for me.
Then, out of nowhere, I got a message on Myspace from this band Fat City
Reprise. They had seen my 3D animated short "Awkward" and they
asked me how much I would charge them to make them a music video like my
short. I listened to their music and I absolutely loved it! I told them I
would make them a video, but I had three rules: I could do whatever I
wanted; make it to any song I wanted; and I could take as long as
necessary. They agreed immediately.
How did you come up with the ideas for the video?
I asked Frank, the vocalist who also wrote the song, to tell everything
he could about what the song meant to him. I never imagined that the song
was actually about his sister's heroin addiction. Soon after he wrote the
song, his sister passed away from an overdose.
I really didn't want to make a music video that had to do with heroin, so
I decided to use it as inspiration, rather than as my subject matter. I
would represent his sister as a child (before heroin) and later as an
adult.
The lyrics describe her relationship with 'a friend'... and how
the friend betrays her. So I decided to represent the friend (heroin)
with a puppet.
What gave you the idea to shoot this video as a series of stills?
I told the band I was going on vacation to Greece for 2 weeks for a
wedding and when I got back I would start on the music video. During my
trip, I was thinking constantly about how I would approach it. My best
friend, who is a professional photographer, asked me to help him
photograph the wedding. While he was prepping a Nikon D200, he started
shooting long bursts, for no reason. We quickly did a test and found we
could shoot like that for about 15-20 seconds before the camera slowed
down to buffer. Eureka!
I knew I wanted the video look as good as film, but we didn't have the
resources. The beauty about a DSLR is that the image quality of each
single frame is fantastic - as good as film. And we had the easy access
to different lenses.
Since a DSLR camera cannot shoot 24 pictures per second, I tried doing
long bursts of myself moving in slow motion. I was hoping I could get it
to look like video, maybe with a unique look to it. Once I saw the
results of my test I knew it would work - but it wouldn't be easy.
This, by the way, is how my best friend, Tommy Agriodimas, the
photographer, got the job of director of photography for the video.
You had an unusual pipeline for this job. How did you come up with it?
It was a real pain! There was no obvious pipeline for this, at least to
my knowledge. I decided to take a shot from beginning to end to work out
and refine the fastest possible way of getting this done. I spend a lot
of my time at work (Charlex in New
York City) doing lighting and compositing. I do
all my compositing in Fusion so I knew I would be doing all my post in
Fusion. The images I pumped out of Fusion would go straight to Final Cut.
One of the biggest time-savers came when I realized I could use iPhoto,
which has a simple scrubbing feature, to preview every shot sequence. I
only wanted to bring 'final frames' to Fusion, so iPhoto made
it easy to just drag frames I had chosen over to Final Cut seamlessly.
Once I knew which frames I was going to use from the edit, I could bring
them into Fusion for processing.
What is your background in Fusion?
I used to be a Shake guy. For the first couple of months
working at Charlex, I used Shake for lighting all my shots. I was
apprehensive at first when they made the decision to switch to Fusion,
but I quickly came to love working in it. We all did. I'm not sure I even
remember how to use Shake at this point.
At Charlex, all of us lighters do all our passes in Maya and then
composite our shots in Fusion. After spending so many hours a week
working on Fusion, it was obvious to me when it came to making this music
video: anything that required FX work, I saw the solution in Fusion.
How did you assemble the images in Fusion?
Most of the shots were edited in Final Cut before I brought them into
Fusion. That way I just had to deal with the frames as if they were
a normal sequence. But there was one exception…
I had a really difficult shot of Poppies moving toward the camera out of
darkness. I shot about 25 different versions. Like almost every other
Poppy shot, you can see my hands or blue sticks. So that was issue one: I
had to get myself out of the shots. But I also wanted to combine several
of them together, so I needed a new Poppy to emerge from the darkness
behind the first Poppy before the first one had left the frame. I accomplished
this by time-warping multiple shots within one comp, using a series of
garbage mattes to help occlude me from every shot. It was the only shot I
actually had to edit start-to-finish in Fusion.
You used Fusion to color correct. How was that?
I color correct like crazy at Charlex. With our tight deadlines, and
often with the need to make immediate color corrections for clients on
the spot, I've learned a lot of tricks to color correct quickly in Fusion.
My video worked with a couple of colors: black and white; green and red.
The most useful color-correcting trick was to take my image sequence and
split it into 3 different nodes... red, green, and blue. By taking these
nodes and then applying some intense contrast followed by some blur, I
was able to create mattes, which allowed me to color correct specific parts of
the shot. I did this on the red dress on the girls, the green of the
grass and trees, or the blue of the blue sticks behind Poppy. It worked
in much the same way as the Maya RGB mattes I generate at Charlex for our
3D work.
What other Fusion tools did you use?
I did a considerable amount of painting in some shots. I used blurs,
glows, many color tools, film grains, time warps. I can't even remember
them all now!
What do you like best about Fusion?
When I was using Shake, I found it really annoying to find nodes.
They weren't well organized and it was often impossible to figure out
what its function was if you had never used that particular node before.
Fusion on the other hand does the opposite. It makes it hard NOT to
know what the function of a node is!
What is your personal favorite shot in this video?
The very first shot I took into Fusion to create a 'Style
frame' - a generic template for the rest of the shots - ended up
being my favorite. There was something about the way I was able to turn this
picture of a girl in a white room looking down toward a light, into a
very atmospheric, kind of surreal, almost heavenly image.
I added a light vignette, some color corrects, some soft glows, blew
out the whites of the room and finally adding some film grain. I really
fell in love with that shot and used it as a reference for every shot
that came afterward.
What are you most proud of in this project?
Based on my limited resources, limited time, and a limited budget (about
$3000), I really couldn't be prouder; that I finished it, and that it
looks as good as it does.
When you're working for clients, you're always working against a
deadline. And sometimes that means feeling that the final version of a
shot is not the best you're capable of. I took on this personal music
video project because I didn't want to deal with deadlines and I wanted
all 150 shots to be the best I could make them.
Do you have any new projects you will be using Fusion on?
I've been taking a break from personal projects! But I hope
to begin on a new music video in March or April. And there is no
question: no matter how I go about making the music video, I will be
using Fusion for all my post production design work.
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Artist Profile: Cesar Kuriyama
Cesar Kuriyama was born in Lima, Peru and grew up a world away in Union City, New Jersey. He received his BFA in Computer Graphics and Interactive Media in 2004. His senior thesis, an animated short called "Awkward" has been selected for screening at over 20 film festivals, winning several awards and distribution deals.
Since then, Cesar has done design, 3D lighting, and animation work for studios such as Marvel Entertainment, the Jim Henson Company, and others. He has also taught courses in computer animation at the New York Film Academy, Harvard University, NYU and his alma mater, the Pratt Institute.
Currently, Cesar is working as 3D Animator and Lighting Technical Director at Charlex, in New York City. He continues to pursue his interests in animation, graphic design, photography, and film. |
All Images Courtesy Cesar Kuriyama. All rights reserved. Digital Fusion, eyeon Fusion, eyeon Generation, eyeon Vision and eyeon Rotation are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of eyeon Software Inc. All trademarks, company names and products are the property of their respective holders. Copyright © 1988-2009 eyeon Software Inc. All rights reserved.
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