Good times, little sleep… Working under creative direction of Kike Maíllo (Best Novel Director 2012, Goya Award for his feature film “Eva”), we managed to pull a grand total of 27 visual pieces for David Bisbal‘s “TU Y YO” american tour… in less than four weeks! Will McDonald’s ever deliver burgers as fast as we delivered video clips on this project… Difference is… our clips tasted far better than a quarter cheese. Being myself a burgerholic as I am…
Core of the team was me and Dani Jimenez, freelance motion graphics artist. Little crooked fella, but got along almost instantly. He came up with some brilliant ideas (like the chess sequence for Torre de Babel – Al Andalus you can see in “Toasty!”), and crafted lots of very neat animations for the entire show.
Got some priceless help from our company team mates Nuria Zapata and Xavi García Ruano as well, plus Jordi can’t-remember-his last-name on a couple of songs, just when we were about to collapse…
Kike had already had most of the concept work done by the moment he came to us. He had just finished his medium-length film “Tú y Yo”, starring María Valverde and David Bisbal himself. A journey of feelings between two people that meet each other, flirt, fall in love, enjoy it, things start going the wrong way, feelings freeze, couple tears apart…
Most of the film actually takes place inside a roadhouse. The “journey” idea was clearly stated on the silver screen. So, concept of the show was to weld this film and DB concert together, structuring song playlist following the feelings sequence on film, recreating that journey on lyrics, lighting and video.
Footage from film revealed to be just perfect to start with, consistently telling a story from the beginning to the end of the show. However, we still had much work to do: having DB and MV on video the entire concert was just boring and a waste of visual resources.
So we started sculpting every piece. Some of them were just about pure but neat footage editing (“No Amanece”). Some featured motion graphics and AE FX solely (“Lloraré”). And, of course, the rest of the videos blended both footage and motion graphics (“10.000 Maneras”). The final entire playlist was carefully color graded to follow stage ligthing palette, which basically dressed up the concert in a sunset-night-sunrise sequence.
Obviously, we had to build every piece following a minimum verse-chorus-solo structure for them to work, but strict beat sync between video and music was not a requirement. However, we got carried away… So, as we knew SMPTE would be our ally on this, had some audio driven FX on some tracks (“Al Andalus – Torre de Babel”).
Final result was a set of visuals blending tight together along the entire spectacle, giving the artist a completely new feeling compared to his previous experience.
Everybody happy.
Then took it easy and completed visuals set with 4 more pieces for the Spain tour. Again, basically AE work, but one very interesting piece came out of it: “Hombre de tu vida” tightly follows music along moving plain color patterns, each of them playing an instrument… Very nice.
Truly open minded as he is, I’d like to thank creative freedom and total professional trust Kike put on us. It’s a real honour having worked with a renouned figure such as him in such a direct and frank way.
Too bad I didn´t have the time yet to edit something nicer than what you´ve already seen above… Cell phones can be a pain in the eye, but I must say these two shots are pretty decent. Some more below!