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::YOUNG GRAVITY::Growing up in the suburbs of Paris, France, Laurent Briet dreamed of becoming an artist, even while his parents prepared him for a career in engineering. Fortunately for the music video industry, this talented director held on to his dream—starting out as an art director for video games, and eventually working his way up through the ranks as a CG artist for other directors.
Briet eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where his artistry with special effects has earned him accolades from his peers, including a 2003 MVPA New Director award for his Red Hot Chili Peppers video “Fortune Faded.” Briet is currently represented by Little Minx, and his latest video project is “Young Gravity” for the up and coming artist Peter Walker. In “Young Gravity,” Briet uses his visual imagery to pack an emotional punch that resonates with the viewers. MVWire recently asked Briet how he crafted his latest video.
Watch: Peter Walker “Young Gravity”
MVWire: What was the creative process in writing the treatment for "Young Gravity"?
Laurent Briet: For this particular project, I knew that the budget wouldn't allow us to do things perfectly. We wouldn't be able to have enough film, enough time...so I wanted to focus on what was essential and work with what I have. I remembered how some basic superimposition shot worked so well in movies like “Metropolis.” The effect was in no way subtle or seamless but it didn't matter either. You perfectly understood what was expressed and that was enough. So when it came to the execution of the concept, I knew from the time I was writing up the idea that I would build my shots this way. I was going to focus on communicating the idea first instead of putting energy into fooling the audience into thinking this was really happening. That's why none of the FX shots in the video are perfect; things move, things look out of scale, and so on.
To achieve this, I also decided to use a different software than the one I usually worked with. Most of my work since I've stopped working in a visual effects studio has been done with Apple Shake. It's a very flexible and powerful software. But the guys at Apple convinced me to give Motion a try. It was not easy to break the old habits and start from scratch on a new software. But for this project, it seems to be perfect for what I was trying to achieve. Very fast, very intuitive, and I wanted to stay away from high end compositing features that would have allowed me to do things too well. The workflow was very pleasant for the most part, and it's a very creative tool. You can quickly put a shot together and watch it in context of the cut in no time.
While listening to the track, I built up this idea that the video was about a man pondering if he should see his love one more time before he dies or just let go as he realize that his time has come. The man, heavily sedated because of his injuries would then let his mind wander into a morphine induced dream concatenating all his thoughts, worries, fear...
MVWire: How did you create the look of the video for the indoor and outside footage?
LB: The look of the video came from the fact that I wanted to explore a new direction. I tend to create images with deep blacks and fairly high contrast. This time I wanted to really create something much brighter. I also wanted it to have almost a water paint look, something light, but I never considered to apply some painterly effects to the footage. I wanted this look and feel to come strictly from the color correction and retain the quality of the film. (We shot this piece on super 16mm.)
Because of budget constrains we used almost no lights at all, but what was available. At the beach, we got lucky that the weather was so overcast. The low altitude grey sky gave us a beautiful diffused light.
In the hospital, Scott Beardslee (DP) used a 4x4 kino flo light to balance the cool whites to the overhead fluorescent and an accented 650 fresnel. The rest was available lights or a bead board. Very, very minimal. Scott is great like this; we worked together to find the shots instead of trying to build them from scratch. In the end, this allowed us to work faster and still grab beautiful images.
The shoot itself was very quick. We had very little time to do everything. The crew was very, very lean. Eight: people, DP (Scott Beardslee), AC, producer (Gina Belvilacqua), her Dutch right hand man (Rudolf Bekker), the actors, (James "PJ" Ransone, Kate Lillecrapp) and myself.
MVWire: Talk about some of the challenges actually shooting “Young Gravity”
LB: The beach scene was shot in the Rockaways in Queens NYC. The hospital was shot in the Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn. We only could afford a four hour window in the hospital to clean up, dress up the abandoned wing, film and be out. The hospital personnel were really amazing and helpful. They put this room together to our specification in no time and provided us with all the equipment we needed.
The editing was the hardest part of the video. Mainly because we had so little footage to work with and one scene could not be shot. We could never find what we needed to shoot it. Since I usually have the structure of the edit matching closely to how songs evolve, a missing scene with little extra footage to fill the void was really painful. But it all worked out fine in the end, despite the constant stomachache while I was cutting this piece.
MVWire: What was the label & artist reaction to the video?
LB: Peter was really happy about the video. He sent me a very enthusiastic email. The reactions were similar from Jo Ann Thrailkill, the video commissioner, and everyone else at the label. They have all been fantastically understanding of the constraints we had to work with and immensely patient with us to finally deliver the video. It was a pleasure to work with them all.
Credits:
Label: Dangerbird Records
Commissioner: Jo Ann Thrailkill
Production Co.: Bevilacqua Prod.
Exec. Producer: Gina Bevilaqua
Director: Laurent Briet
DP: Scott Beardslee
Editor: Laurent Briet
