fall of antioch

The Film "Fall of Antioch" is an experimental music video created for the musician Mike Paradines also known as "Mu-Ziq". "Fall of Antioch" is the track we used from his Album "Bilious Paths". The following text describes a behind-the-scenes depiction with emphasis on the conceptual phase and its ideas and a rough outline of the technical realization.

Concept

The title of the track "Fall of Antioch" is hinting the demise of the once great ancient city Antioch in 1268. In our imagination, a historical illustration would have been unsuitable for the music. We felt it being more elaborate to combine the "charisma" of the historical events with pictures of modern, urban places and a personal fate. Therefore we placed all the events of the video to esence. Especially in conjunction with the disposition we got from listening to the music on the ‘Windows Media Player’ with the "Particle Visualisation" engaged, we came up with the concept of defamiliarization."Particle Visualisation" Screenshot of Ripomatic Defamiliarization is a common process by which the confidante becomes alienated and can be perceived in a completely new way.
Other techniques commonly employed to achieve defamiliarization are "repetition" (e.g. some of Warhol's prints),"isolation" (e.g. Duane Hanson's work) and, more generally,"irony" and "satire". We felt that "combination" also could cause this effect.
In the final conceptual stage of the video we pictured on short personal moment, frozen in time, in a deserted urban landscape while pixels fall from the sky pattering on the environment. The juxtaposition of this phenomenon with slow-motion cinematography and the attention to what would normally be considered as peripheral details (shadows on walls, streetlights, exposed electrical wiring, etc.) combine to create an eerie sense of defamiliarization.
With this in mind an Animatic and Ripomatic was created. A Ripomatic is similar to an Animatic, but only consists of existing images, pictures, scenes, films etc. and serves as an inspirational source. It shows the flow and rhythm of the final film and especially inspires for more ideas.

Production

I the first stage of Production we created several technical tests of "computer pixels" falling on real shot environments. To make the pixels look coherent we designed their size and shape constant to one pixel and independent from their distance to the camera respectively. The idea was to create a significant, unrelated difference between the environment and the pixels. Additionally the frame rate was reduced to half the frame rate of the environment in order to emphasize this concept.
In the course of the production the "abstract pixels" were modified to "physical small plates" because the results looked good on a computer monitors but too blurred and unrecognisable on standard TV Screens.
Principal photography of the video was scheduled in Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Vienna and Bratislava because of their modern and peculiar urban environments. We primarily tried to find aesthetic places and situations and only had a few specific locations in mind to shoot.
The main equipment were three digital SLR Cameras, a standard miniDV Camera, and a specially and highly-developed High Speed Camera, provided by the Frauenhofer Institute, capable of shooting 2000fps in 2k resolution and 10000fps in PAL/NTSC. We used a miniDV camera primarely due to more flexibility, freedom and spontaneity which are obtained with less equipment. We therefore applied and developed several methods to make miniDV look more similar to film. The three SLR Cameras were used to make high resolution pictures for image-based modelling, photogrammetry and in some rare cases for compositing reasons. Several scenes in the video are solely produced with these techniques and were only possible to be realized this way because most locations were filled with people and unwanted objects. This also required a lot of retouching of the images not being produced in CG. In the postproduction process many shots also had to undergo heavy stabilizing. The final Colour Correction was done on the "da Vinci 2K Colour Enhancement System".