Believe in Fre3fall

The Skinny

‘Believe’ is a song from the soundtrack of ‘The Band’ – a weekly TV series about the pop band Fre3fall. The show tracks the teenage band’s life and adventures on campus and stage. As the series premiered on Okto Singapore in January 2010, music videos were created and released online to support the series by the show’s creators and producers The Moving Visuals Co.

‘Believe’ reflects the show’s themes of imagination, ambition and self-belief. The video captures the transformation of its key cast members from ordinary guys to super band Fre3fall, and their brush with instant celebrity.

Director Mak CK decided to take a stop-motion approach to capture the band’s world of music and wonder. Mak felt that this primitive and avant-garde technique was perfect for a music video. Being his first music video and stop-motion effort, the challenge to marry two virgin efforts was too tempting to resist.

The Production

Stop-motion production is a labour of love, with an emphasis on ‘labour’. All in all, the entire video involved 1,500 painstakingly choreographed photographs.

To direct the film, every frame was storyboarded. Most stop-motion videos vary between six to 25 frames per second. This music video was shot at 10 frames a second – not as physically demanding as 25 to execute but a lot smoother on the eyes than six.

The duration of each scene was determined both by how long it took to play out in real-time, and also the amount of physical action involved onscreen. This allowed for the stretching out or speeding up of movements in each scene to dramatise the visual storytelling.

While pre-production was fun, the shoot was a test of patience, continuity and meticulous detail. Every animate and inanimate element had to be in exactly the right position for every shot (every 10th second of the video).

The most memorable sequence was also the most difficult to execute: a performance scene where the band played to a mosh pit of about 100 hats, caps and wigs. To get the ‘crowd’ to do the Mexican wave and bop, every one of the 100 ‘heads’ had to be repositioned for every frame. 300 shots and almost an hour later, the team bagged 30 seconds of mosh pit footage, all in the name of stop-motion.

Although 90 percent of the video was shot old-school stop-motion, certain lip-sync sequences were shot on high definition video instead of stills, and treated in post.

The entire shot took a day and a half in a studio and outdoor location. Photographer Jester Alcaraz used a Nikon D200 camera, while Italian DOP Andrea Turri created the lighting for the studio and filmed lip sync sequences on a Panasonic HDX-900 DVCPro HD camera.

The Post

After an intensive pre-production phase and shoot, post was a relative breeze. Image sequencing all the photographs enabled the base cut to be laid out in Final Cut Pro in a matter of minutes. For better or worse, there was little room for changes at this stage. With the timeline ready, it was a matter of then grading and working out the transitions between scenes.

Mak wanted to incorporate the music video element of lip-syncing without breaking the stop-motion treatment of the film. So the team experimented by inter-cutting between takes of each lip-sync scene every four frames to simulate the stop-motion effect in post. In the end, each video sequence was treated with an onion skinning software, to further enhance the feel of stop-motion animation.

The final video can be seen on youtube.

Credits Title: Believe music video featuring Fre3fall Production Company: The Moving Visuals Co. Director: Mak CK Producer: Mak CK Photographer: Jester Alcaraz Post Production: The Moving Visuals Co. Editor: Jester Alcaraz Cameraman & Lighting: Andrea Turri Executive Producer: Khim Loh