I just love this kind of video as a new art form!

From Oren's MySpace page: ...a unique style that combines photography, design, 3d animation, stop motion and 2d compositing.

Mmmmmm.

Another video over the same song that probably made the original team some money:

Bjorn, I finally heard back from the young lady this morning, regarding the use of compositing. She said:

"No use of green screen, everything on the video was there in the room and on the bed."

The cello at the beginning sure looked overlaid.

Oren's MySpace page (see Tim L's post above for the URL) describes it as ...a unique style that combines photography, design, 3d animation, stop motion and 2d compositing.

I tossed my four page concession speech already. :O)

Why are you so intent on proving that the video involved something other than just a still camera and some incredible talent? Don't throw away that concession speech just yet...

On Oren Lavie's MySpace page in the blog section under the heading, "Everything you wanted to know about HER MORNING ELEGANCE video", it states:

* The video was shot all stills - roughly 3225 still photos for the entire video, using one camera, hanging from the ceiling for the main body of the movie.
* It took 4 weeks before shooting to create an animated computer generated storyboard for the video, with 3d dummies for the characters.
* It took only 2 days of shooting for the live actors on set to re-create the 3.5 minute computer sequence, frame by frame.

Nowhere does it say that anything other than a series of stills of live actors were employed in the making of this video. Even the actress in the video has directly confirmed this fact.

I don't want this to sound like I'm prolonging an argument, but I found this video so intriguing -- and the discussions and opinions here so interesting as well -- that this afternoon I sent an email to the animators, Yuval and Merav Nathan, via the "contact" link on their www.onewingfly.com web page. Just a short time ago got a response from Yuval.

[By the way -- Oops! Yes, I used the word "fantastic" twice in the same paragraph at the start. It sounds really bad on re-reading... wish I'd noticed it at the time]

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My Email to the Nathans:
Congratulations on your fantastic video, Her Morning Elegance. I think it is absolutely fantastic! You must be very proud of its success.

We have been discussing this video over on the Sony Vegas video editing message board (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=636814&Replies=29).

Could you answer a question for us? Were any parts of the video composited (added in later) on the computer? Or was everything in the final video actually shot at the same time, as part of the stop motion process. For example, the sock-fish, the cello, the bubbles -- were all of those elements actually on the bed in the original photograph, or were any items added in later.

Any other information you could provide about the creation of this video -- the conceptualization, pre-production animation, planning, etc. -- would be interesting to hear as well.

Thank you very much for your time.

Sincerely,
Tim Landwehr

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Yuval's Response:

Hi Tim,
thanks for the compliments.
there was no compositing in this piece.
we shot it almost as a one shot in two crazy days. all was based on a very acurate 3d previz that we prepard before.
all the preperation, script, 3d previz,lighting, props, choosing the actress, and the environament took us about a month.
after the shootings we did some color correction, but the editing and timing was set before the shootings.

yuval

Sounds good to me.

Dave T2

Why are you so intent on proving that the video involved something other than just a still camera and some incredible talent?

I wasn't trying to prove anything, just trying to find the actual truth, which turned out to be more difficult than perhaps anticipated.

Nowhere does it say that anything other than a series of stills of live actors were employed in the making of this video. Even the actress in the video has directly confirmed this fact.

Contrary to the belief of many video editors, Photoshop has been used for compositing since V1.0. And long before Photoshop appeared, I did optical composites both on motion picture film and still film.

I speculated that the video was done using a combination of techniques, including stop motion.

So was I wrong in speculating that compositing was used, because I was prejudiced by my thinking how I would have done it (because I couldn't spend a month on a project like this)?


Well, let's see:

From the creators of the video we now have two contradictory statements:

1. ...combines photography, design, 3d animation, stop motion and

and

2. ...there was


If I had to guess, I would give greater weight to the second statement, because it wasn't made by "the actress in the video."

So it seems more likely that I was wrong than that I was right about the use of compositing.

The statements are not contradictory. The first one you're quoting was a description of the creative team and what they do in general. The second statement was about this specific project.

Rob