Director Frank Borin is a smart man. He knows exactly where your attention is drawn when a naked woman is on-screen and that is where he places footage of singer/songwriter Rocco DeLuca. It's a simple, yet effective conceit that — to paraphrase the lyrics — may indeed the most beautiful thing you've ever seen.
Frank Borin, director: This was one of the best and most unique experiences I’ve had on a video. Rocco is the first signing to Kiefer Sutherland and Jude Cole’s Ironworks Music label and starred in the recent documentary I Trust You To Kill Me with Kiefer. So, I got to work really close with Kiefer and Jude, which was amazing. Every element was discussed and planned out with them from the look, lighting, coloring all the way down to the shots and wardrobe (or lack of wardrobe).
It was a two day shoot that spanned over two weekends because we had to film all of Rocco’s footage, and then transfer and edit it so we could project it the following weekend with the girl.Even though the video seems very simple, the one element which really threw everyone for a curve was projecting on a sheet of water. It sounds good in theory, but light passes through clear water like a pane of glass. I wanted to avoid doing it in post because I needed the projections to have a very organic feel.
Since I originally came up with the idea to project on water after seeing Disneyland’s Fantasmic show when I was a kid, we decided to tech scout at the happiest place on earth. Fantasmic was able to project on water by shooting the water out 40 feet in the air as a fine high-pressurized mist. We didn’t have that luxury since this would destroy the soundstage.
We lucked out by finding these engineers who devised a method to project images on water by determining the distance between droplets and the size those droplets would have to be to achieve this. So we were able to rent their rig from them, which worked perfectly and gave us some truly memorable images.
--> watch "Colorful"
Rocco DeLuca And The Burden "Colorful" (Ironworks)
Frank Borin, director/editor | Ari Weiner, producer | Maz Makhani, DP
