A Wild House Party in Reverse, Shot with the ARRI Alexa

MTV wanted to show that it’s serious about this weekend’s launch of its new series, Skins, a stateside remake of the popular Brit teen-life drama, with one of the biggest campaigns in the channel’s history. It trusted promo duties to writer-director Evan Silver, a veteran of the MTV on-air promo department who made a splash last year with a campaign promoting the MTV Movie Awards. This time around, he’s used the super-hot ARRI Alexa to shoot a two-and-a-half minute reversed-motion short full of half-dressed, booze-guzzling high-schoolers and set to the grinding, swaggering beats of “Kids” by Sleigh Bells.

A “clean” version was provided to air on some channels, but here’s the full clip released this week, designed to attract the maximum number of eyeballs online – and on MTV, but only after 10 p.m. According to ETonline.com, the stateside version of Skins has now been named “the most dangerous show for teens” by a group called the Parents Television Council. Mission accomplished? “As long as we showed some repercussions from [the lead actress’] actions, falling down the stairs or passing out, for example, we were allowed to show teen partying as it is,” Silver said in a prepared statement.

The choreographed house party, which was staged to subtly highlight character notes that will become apparent as the show airs, was shot in reverse over two days with a Steadicam rig on a carefully lit location in Toronto. Editor Nathan Byrne at Post Millennium in New York says he and Byrne sorted footage by the level of drunkenness on display in a given shot but tried to rely on performances, rather than “drug and sex imagery,” to set the tone for a party that gets progressively wilder as the night goes on – and, thus, less wild as the spot progresses. The final piece was colored by Micah Kirz at Out of the Blue, whose work on a campaign for Cointreau was recently featured at StudioDaily.

Skins premieres Monday, January 17, on MTV.

Credits:
Client: MTV
Show: Skins
Title: “Reverse Party” 2:30
Airdate: 1/10/11

Director/Writer: Evan Silver (www.evansilverps.com)
Executive Producer: Carlo Trulli, SPY FILMS
Producer: Caroline O’Hare
VP Creative Director: Joe Ortiz
MTV Brand Manager: Jill Crawford
Director of Photography: Carlos Veron
Production Company: Spy Films, Toronto
Producers: Shannon Brand, Richard Cureton
Production Manager: Pete Vanstone
Editorial: Post Millennium, NY (www.postmillennium.com)
Editor: Nathan Byrne
Post Executive Producer: Adam Soutar
Post Producer: Thomas Maiorino
Music Supervisor/Sound Designer: Dave Hnatiuk
Music: Sleigh Bells “Kids”
Color Correct: Micah Kirz, Out of the Blue (www.outoftheblueny.com)
Visual Effects: Alien Kung Fu, NY (www.alienkungfu.com)
VFX Compositing: Marco Ruesta
VFX Design: James Gunderson
VFX Roto: Akira Uchinokura
VFX Creative Director: Charlie No
VFX EP: Brandon Litman
Title Design/Producer: Oren Kaunfer, MTV on-air design