Editor Amanda James of Final Cut in London was surprised and excited when she got a call to work with Tim Burton on what was his first music video. With Burton’s cinematic style and his unique genre of the amusing morbid, it is not surprising the video for The Killers track 'Bones' involved people morphing into skeletons and a mix of live action and CG. For James, it was a matter of developing the storyline in which two lovers at a drive-in watch a film starring themselves turning into skeletons. Things heat up at the drive in when life imitates art as the couple strip down to their osteological essentials as do The Killers during their performance. What else would you expect from Tim Burton.
Studio Daily: Explain your approach to this project and what kind of direction did Tim Burton give you?
With music videos it’s important to establish a performance bed and I felt this especially so on this project as Tim had never shot band performance before. His main concern, given his background was naturally the narrative element, so I had to fairly quickly assemble a rough structure so that he would be able to envisage how the performance and narrative would function together throughout the video. Once this was done we worked together to incorporate the skeleton, CG part of the narrative.
How difficult is it to edit a project with so many CG characters and what was the process?
Other than a couple of location setups the entire film was shot against green screen, so we had to imagine when and where the skeletons would be. We were in constant contact with MPC’s post production supervisor Chas Jarrett and as scenes were locked down I handed them over to their 3D department. There was no real back and fourth between us as give or take a scene or two, I pretty much had to lock the whole thing down before they could begin.
You mentioned you learned a lot from how Tim Burton approaches his multi-layered projects, what specifically about his approach differed from ways you had approached similar projects in the past?
Tim’s films are generally very effects heavy so it was interesting for me to see the level of preparation involved in this film, being on a relatively small scale from Tim’s perspective. Sometimes in music videos shooting for effects can be a little compromised by time and budgetary constraints, however in this case everything was meticulously planned. They even asked if I needed an effects editor to work in conjunction with me as you would normally have on a feature film. I think Tim was impressed at the level of finesse I applied to the effect shots, I guess he’s not used to that being done to such a degree at the offline stage.
Technically, what was the workflow?
The performance footage was shot on HDSI whilst the set ups with the couple were shot on 35mm. The project was shot on a mixture of HDCAM SR and 16mm (which was transferred to HDCAM SR). It was shot at 23.97fps (essentially 24fps) in order to give it a ‘filmic’ look once it was transferred back to PAL on completion. All the material was loaded into Avid Film Composer for the edit. It was finished up HD at MPC, this enabled them to work on the CG in a frame based way rather than being concerned with PAL/NTSC issues.
CREDITS:
Artist: The Killers
Track: Bones
Record Label: Island Records
Production Company: Refused TV
Director: Tim Burton
Producer: Nikki Penny
Film Editors: Final Cut London
Editor: Amanda James
Post Production: MPC
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