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7th June 2016
Life’s a glitch
Title of film: Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, The Specialist
Director: Parachutes
Production Company: Slow Dance
Parisian collective Parachutes picks up quirky brief for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at our very own 1.4 Awards

How did the film come about and what was the brief?

Actually we were at your 1.4 awards dinner in London last year and someone from Karla Otto (the agency that handles Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week) saw the music video we did for Maestro. A couple of weeks later they contacted us with a brief; they wanted to make an episode of their “Creative Shorts” series about selfies and altered faces.

We love your quirky ideas – how did the narrative evolve for this?

We had to match the tone of the previous episodes of the series: amusing but not too gag-esque. Also, we had to make fun of selfie takers, without being too sarcastic or too mean, so it was interesting and difficult to find the right balance.

We wondered why people would share such sophisticated and phoney pictures of themselves, and pretty soon we imagined that suddenly everyone would actually see our character as her last selfie. Also in this world, selfies would have become such a common thing that jobs would have been created involving them, like our specialist.

Did Parachutes work on the post or did you collaborate with a post house?

We did the editing but the color-grading and VFX were handled by Nightshift in Paris.

What was the most challenging aspect of making the film?

Probably writing the dialogues! It was the first time we had to write comedy, with people actually talking to each other. We had no idea how difficult it is to find the right tone, not too flat but also not too dramatic… We knew what we wanted the characters to say, but struggled a lot formulating it. Being French didn’t help, so we were assisted by a very talented English writer named Gabriel Bisset-Smith.

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Credits
Written & directed by Parachutes Production: SlowDance (Juliette Lambert & Valentine Suc) Cast: Jayne Min & Justin O'Shea Creative direction: Aldona Kwiatkowski & Seyna Van Der Linden Co-written with Gabriel Bisset-Smith DOP: Michael McMillin Post-production: Nightshift Music: Liszt's 'La Campanella' performed by Septième Car: Mercedes-AMG G 63