The indie rock band Modest Mouse is getting the royal treatment from Bent Image Lab director Nando Costa. The band's new music video, "Whale Song," is a dark and expressive piece of filmmaking. Heavily rooted in live action, the six-minute video includes intense moments of stop motion, visual effects and motion graphic techniques, all brought to life at Bent Image Lab.

"Whale Song" for Modest Mouse from Bent Image Lab on Vimeo.

Concept
After entering his personal sanctuary, an artist is presented with a hand-crafted drawing tool that assists him in materializing his mental impressions. The machine discharges his thoughts as an endless web of yarn that guides him through his physical thoughts. The story progresses to reveal that he is divided between two worlds, one of dull reality and the second of warped memories. In the process of finding a way out of his consciousness, he is trapped between the two competing spaces, which eventually inflict lethal damage, acting as metaphors of self-destruction.

Production
This lyrical and moving piece was conceived by Nando Costa, who collaborated with lead singer/guitarist Isaac Brock to polish some of the film's intricacies. Featuring a seamless combination of live action and stop motion that alternates between stage shots of Modest Mouse and a spiraling, dreamlike world of ever-shifting landscapes, "Whale Song" is a stunning representation of the combined capabilities of Nando and Bent. The variety and execution of the VFX portions of the video—from yarn reeling into complex patterns to a guitar that plays with no musician attached—evoke the confused and surreal patterns of one's warped memories. Additional creative touches such as animated and intricate photographic collages and giant CG snails sliding across the band's stage—add variety and depth to the Bent world.

"This new video is the perfect showcase for the benefits of the collaboration between myself and Bent," notes Costa. "I typically wouldn't have created a film with this much live action or stop motion, and Bent also wouldn't normally approach a project with such a strong motion graphics influence, which is what I have long specialized in. With such well integrated in-house teams, I can't imagine that there's a project out there that we couldn't pull off."

One of the challenges in "Whale Song" was in crafting the contours of an ever changing, disorienting series of landscapes. Costa shot the majority of the piece with Bent's RED ONE cameras, whose 4K resolution enabled the team to add camera movement in post.

In order to create the feeling that Brock was being split up between two competing scenarios of reality and his imagination, for example, Costa mounted two of the RED cameras side by side on a custom plate, each with identical lenses set at an angle to simulate a stereoscopic effect.

In another instance, band members that appeared to be standing on the ground were actually hoisted aloft and secured to a fake ground plane, which meant that the stage floor was perpendicular to the ground. This situation intentionally restrained their flexibility and shifted the gravity, adding oddness to their movements.

Costa used a variety of frame rates, ranging from time lapses at 6fps to 1,000fps shots from a Vision Research Phantom camera, to vary the intensity of Isaac Brock's warped recollections. Bluescreen stages were used extensively to place Brock against the varying landscapes of mountains, dense forest valleys and deserts. Bent's CG department created significant portions of the video's landscapes and scenic elements.

During production, Nando and his team relied on a detailed script containing technical and creative notes, live action and animation guidelines, with specifications for compositing and stop motion, which were all previously defined and polished by the director. "From what I've learned, producing a project at Bent is a wonderfully self-contained experience," notes Costa. "From building intricate props to figuring out complex CG shots, Bent has specialists in all fields. I'll walk over to the stage for live action, then back to compositing, load the footage and work from there. It makes the whole process immeasurably easier, and creatively freeing."

"Seeing this video makes me feel good about what we've done here at Bent," says Bent executive producer Ray Di Carlo. "We set out to establish a creative clubhouse atmosphere where talented people like Nando could come to work. I've always admired directors who can hold a project's final vision in their minds eye and are able to let the talents around them do their respective jobs for a projects whose creative whole becomes more than the sum of it's parts, and that defines Nando. Seeing Nando come in, suddenly doing things that he wasn't used to doing, and still delivering at a high creative and technical level, means that David, Chel and I were able to create a place where everyone learns others' disciplines. That's rare. It's what we set out to do—what we originally wanted—but when you see it work, it's amazing."