IN DEPTH: Bloc Party "I Still Remember"

There's a practical side to shooting on a green screen and then compositing backgrounds and other elements during post — less money, less travel, etc — but the creative team of Dan Shapiro and Alex Topaller over at Aggressive didn't have practicality in mind when they set about on the Bloc Party video, "I Still Remember." Not only did they have to travel to England to work with the band, they had to shoot an enormous amount of footage using just two vintage train seats to create the rows upon rows of people on a train you see in this video. And, most importantly, the green screen/composite technique here isn't done to replicate reality or a traditional music video; It's used to create shots that are either impossible or extraordinarily time-consuming and expensive to pull off on a practical set or location.

Video Static is pleased to present this In Depth in conjunction with leading Bloc Party fansite blocparty.net. Visit blocparty.net for additional comments from Aggressive and pictures from the set.

Aggressive: "Since this is meant to look like a one-shot video, we needed to find some manageable 'building blocks' to shoot and then composite together. We figured the activity in a train car can be broken down to what goes on in its seats, we got two vintage maroon-leather train seats and bolted them to a green stage. This pair of seats became the little stage on which [singer] Kele's memories plays out.

We shot one pair of seats at a time, keeping the camera locked stationary and getting as much image in frame as possible. All camera moves were done in composite later. Once we had this toolbox collection of train seats and passengers, we built the actual structural rows of the train cars, 'editing' the scenes by bringing in a new pair of seats as our camera pulls through the train.

The sticky thing about this isn't the difficulty of any individual shot, but the sheer quantity of footage needed to produce a train car full of different people, who all need to appear on screen simultaneously. We had the set running like an assembly line: extras and band waiting in the wings, hop on, sit down, ride the train, hop off; we had everyone available jumping on the set. You can even spot us in a couple of shots, riding the train through the daily grind." (photo of a monitor showing Bloc Party's Kele Okereke and Aggressive's Dan Shapiro on opposite sides of the "train")

--> watch "I Still Remember" Quicktime // Windows Media // YouTube

Bloc Party "I Still Remember" (Vice/Atlantic)
Aggressive, directors | JP Fox, producer | Refused TV, production co

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Shooting in Atlanta...

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Pigeon John "Freaks! Freaks!" (Quannum)
Paul "Coy" Allen, director | Midas Entertainment, production co | Sebastian Jungwirth, DP | Mark Bella, editor