Still scratching your head over director Ellis Bahl's one-take, yet non-linear "Red Hands" video for Walk Off The Earth? The one where footage was shot out of order and at various speeds, only to be remixed in a final edit?
Well, maybe it makes more sense if you watch this unedited version which is exactly how they shot it:
Still confused? Well, here's the director explaining how one successfully fucks with the space-time continuum...
Ellis Bahl, director:
"Initially I wanted to make a narrative video where you take a one-shot and scrub along the timeline to tell the story out of order. I wanted it to look like when you drag the mouse back and forth in the viewer in Final Cut. When the Walk Off The Earth brief came along, I realized I could do the same thing with a performance video. I decided to walk the camera back in a straight line because I thought maybe it would give more temporal/spacial context to the scrubbing. It's hard to tell what's going on as it is, but I think the forward/backwards movement helps a bit.
My favorite part in the video is when they are building that drum set all out of order. I really wish I had come up with more things like that to have them do. It was difficult to figure out before hand what was going to be interesting to watch out of order. In fact, I find the un-edited version to be a more interesting and compelling video because it's just crazy to see this band doing such a difficult thing for a single four minute take. I've now decided that I'm going to view them as a package. Neither is whole without the other. I've got them both on my website, because I think each enhances the worth of the other.
It was pretty crazy listening to the fucked up track (the official set term for the remix) all day. A lot of crew said that when they saw the actual video they were really confused because they forgot that the fucked up track was fucked up and they had come to think of it as the actual song. The scariest thing for me was that I had to make the fucked up track a week before the shoot, so I had to lock down the order of shooting way in advance of knowing so many other things (like what/how big the location was, what the effects were going to be, and what the choreography was gonna be). So I sort of just winged something that I hoped would work.
And here's the final version:
Walk Off The Earth "Red Hands" (Columbia)
Ellis Bahl, director/editor | Courtney Davies, Jason Colon, producer | Doomsday, production co | Pat Scola, DP | Max Orgell, production designer | Susie Gados, art director | Tristin Scott, stylist | Isaac Ravishankara, vfx | Danielle Hinde, exec. producer | Bryan Younce, commissioner
