One thing I got to admit is… I like BSK visual art team. Though loooots of fashion brands spend trillions just shitting videos down the toilette, these guys trully care about making fine pieces, with a minnimum but effective story telling, an elegant-never-pretentious visual touch and carefully selected soundtracks.
So… how come these guys don’t have a post team of their own? Don’t get it, really… I’m OK with it. Keep the clips rolling down, fellas.
So BSK is teasing new AW14 collection by giving an outdoors party in the middle of the forest, some nice and quiet place to dress up pine trees with visuals projections and fill the air with some cool music. This clip tells the story of a pack of urban-good-looking-wolves getting into the forest looking for this misterious party.
16 mm footage, tattoed trees, people running from here to there… As always, the idea was to lift the whole piece up by adding some nice FX. Briefing from BSK was quite vague to start with, but general idea was to give it more a subtle VFX flavour rather than some agressive motion graphics approach.
Started working on each shot separately on one unnegotiable condition: FX work had to be built up using After Effects only: my girlfriend and I were just about to deliver… my son Martín! So didn’t know if I would have to run to the hospital and leave this project unwrapped. Dearest Dani Jimenez (that great AE wizard that pulled half the visuals for DB World Tour), would be my replacement guy, but he does not know any Nuke…
First thing was to slo-mo several shots to break rythm down at some nice points, stretching the whole piece longer.
Added some fog to accentuate mistery feeling and built some dust particle systems to give daytime shots kind of a magical-dreamy taste.
Trees were quite an obvious target, so tracked a few and added animated eyes painted on them.
Then attacked night time shots. Original lighting on location was kind of cheap, too basic and flat. Added some flashes coming from the forest and some bokeh and more particles on dance shots.
Rendered every shot separately and imported all files into FCP X to edit.
And this is when it happenned: I listened to the soundtrack for the first time. Ha! Yeah! Video Editing 101 first lesson: thouroughly review the whole material. As first briefing was that vague, I had assumed soundtrack was not that important and left headphones on the table when reviewing the original clip…
Soundtrack was amazing, and it helped me trully understand the whole feeling of the story. I guess it was specially composed for this campaign, as I tried to Shazam it with no results…
Edited a first dratf version, went back to AE to add some distortion jumps and decomposed the blonde-staring-at-the-moon shot into several planes to give it a parallax effect. Did final color for every shot and imported everything back into FCP X to wrap it all up. Had to do some audio editing as well: original track was too short for this extended version.
Final piece is just my best work for Bershka so far. Key was… music. Just the right thing for every frame of footage.
Gorgeous.