Remember that music video for Sour’s “Hibi No Neiro” we posted? You know, the one with dazzling displays of intercontinental webcam synchronicity? We wanted to know how they did it. Somehow, dozens of individuals had filmed themselves responding to carefully crafted choreography, and the resulting mountain of footage had been combined into something far greater than the sum of its parts– a geometrically beautiful display of cyber-social cooperation, like some sort of remote flash mob. How do you pull something like that off?
The answer lies in the massive pooled talents of four clever filmmakers– a brain trust, if you will– at the helm of this mind-bogglingly complex music video, shot on a $0 budget. The aptly named co-director Magico Nakamura graciously granted us a peek inside the bag of tricks that brought the Sour video together, providing sketches, screenshots and even an exclusive rough draft of the video, showing off rad techniques that didn’t make the final cut.
How many people participated in the video, and where did you find them all?
More than 80 people were involved in the production. Most of them were Sour fans that we’d gathered from the band’s website, from other social networking sites and from contacts we’d gathered while making Sour’s other music videos.
Could the participants see any of the other webcams, or were they blindly relying on your directions?
We filmed everyone separately so there weren’t multiple webcams on the screen however, we made quite detailed animatics of the entire music video and would send it to the people before filming, so generally people had a fair idea of what they were contributing to.
This provided a helpful guide that helped the fans wrap their heads around the choreography. For the more complicated action i.e. the dance sequence, we created individual movie files that people used to practice with before filming began. They also used these as an on screen guide while we directed them.
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