Your work has evolved fantastically over the last year or so – do you put this down to experience and what are the key lessons you have learnt about film making?
Wait a second. Does that mean you don’t like my earlier work?
Actually I came up with this idea together with my good friend Christian Schuck. He is an Executive Creative Director at M&C Saatchi and if he would hear that he’d say that my work has evolved fantastically only because this is the first music video he was involved in. But kidding aside. I had to take a little time out from directing due to setting up the company with my partner Anna Honerlagen. But now that I got everything up and running I’m back directing 100%.
How did working with Ki Theory come about. Have you worked in the States before?
Gotcha! This video wasn’t shot in the states at all. We shot everything in Berlin, except the Cameo part with Joel. Joel and his management have been quick & supportive during the whole but very short process.
Did you work closely with band on the narrative? Did you draw up a detailed treatment then storyboard?
I’d very much like to say – yes, of course we did – to show how incredibly professional working with us is. But no we didn’t. I came up with the idea together with my friend Kidde (Christian Schuck). We’ve got the same taste and always contact each other to bounce ideas off of each other.
So we wrote a plot. Joel liked it. We turned it into a narrative script. Joel liked it. We cast two people. Joel liked them, too. We said we’d now make a great film. Joel provided us with a shot of himself. We liked it. We showed him the final product. Joel loved it. That’s pretty much how the production process felt like.
What were the main challenges of the shoot – for instance night shooting is always rather tricky, how did you work out the lighting for that?
Oh yes. Shooting at night can be a total bitch. But we came prepared. We spent a lot of time scouting locations and working on a lighting concept with our DP Yoshi Heimrath. We only had one night for the whole. We also used the new Red Dragon with 6k and great light sensitivity which gave us all the possibilities in the post later on.
However there are always problems and delays and you start whining about how great two days would have been….
The editing is excellent, the reveal perfectly paced. Were you involved with this?
Thumbs up for our editor Cornelis Harder who did an amazing job. We were sitting there from beginning until the end and it has been some long sessions in the editing suite.
