Like A Rolling Stone: a classic Dylan song, performed by a legendary band, received premiere treatment from Michel Gondry and his BUF Compagnie brethren. The mega-award winning video, featuring Patricia Arquette who later starred in Human Nature, tore apart any semblance of standards in the commercial and promo industries. It also ripped reality, and the filming of it, into more complex pieces.
We'll let Pierre Buffin, co-founder of visual-effects masters BUF Compagnie (they did the stove-ignition, bomb, trashcan, love-making, and gun-in-face sequences in Fight Club), elaborate:
"We had already worked on different projects with Michel Gondry, such as video-clips like Björk, Lenny Kravitz or Terence Trent D'Arby. During his visits to BUF, we showed him the new tools we were developing and the new effects they could provide. One day we showed him our tool for modeling objects from two pictures, based on stereophotogrammetry.
From time to time, Michel called us, because he had an idea for a film and wanted to know if it would be possible to use this effect. We finally did a test with Michel himself. From only two pictures taken from two synchronized still cameras, we modeled Michel jumping in the air, surrounded by buildings. Once the environment was modeled and textured with our tool, it was possible to create a scene where a virtual computer camera was turning around a frozen-in-the-air Michel Gondry.
Another effect was to use one picture out of five from a film and do an image warping to do the transition. With four pictures per second (instead of 24 for a film), it was possible to recreate a film in a slightly different way and play on the elements of the image to create a weird atmosphere. The basic ideas to do the 'Rolling Stones' video-clip were there. Using only one or two still camera allows for great flexibility. It becomes useless to use big 35mm or video-cameras.
For the 'party' of the video-clip, a real party was thrown, and after a while the Rolling Stones came, much to the pleasure of the participants. The group immediately split to enjoy the party. Michel then had only to look for them and take pictures, like a real 'Paparazzo'. That's one of the reasons why the party looks so 'real'.
Most of the clip is based on pictures, only some parts of the concert have been filmed. That is what we regret most. The concert was supposed to be fake, and the Rolling Stones were only supposed to play the song of the clip. But after a while, the band decided to do an improvised concert that lasted until dawn. And of course, we were not on the shooting stage for this unique concert.
We only had three weeks to complete six minutes of effects from more than 1,000 morphings and several freeze sequences. Michel made an animatic with the still pictures, and during this three weeks we replaced the pictures with a reconstructed film."
The origin of these effects is up for grabs. Most credit Tim Macmillan with time-slice experimentation in the 1980's, before founding Time-Slice Films in 1997. The facts are confusing, but VFXPro.com has given a shot at documenting this technique which was introduced to the masses with Gondry's video for "Like A Rolling Stone."
