The world of music video production is full of examples of clips that started out as carefully thought out concepts and ended up, due to the harsh realities of production, as a series of random images. Director Keith Schofield faced no such issues on his video for French singer Charlotte Gainsbourg's "Heaven Can Wait," the duet with Beck that she sings on her new CD. In fact, the director's concept was based entirely on random, inexplicable images he found on the Internet, which he re-created using the artists and various actors in individual slow-motion shots. His biggest conceptual concern for the project was to maintain for the viewer a sense of complete randomness and meaninglessness.

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck, "Heaven Can Wait"
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The images came from the extensive folder the director maintains of found photography from various Internet sites. "I gravitate to pictures of unknown origin, things that are clearly not the work of an artist," he says. "So we have a photo of a guy with baby dolls sticking out through his 1970s-era shirt or a skateboard with pancakes instead of wheels. I mean, where did this come from? Somebody staged this. Why? Is it a joke? I thought it would be a visually compelling video if we re-created some of these scenes, and every couple of seconds we'd go to another shot with no context at all."

Schofield worked with his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Damian Acevedo, on the shoot, which consisted of re-creating some 50 of these found photos in slow motion using a Panavised RED ONE camera (Build 20). They'd arrive at a location and then figure out which of the many tableaux they could stage there. In a house, they could shoot the image of Gainsbourg applying makeup in a bathroom mirror as a man in a gorilla mask watches from the tub. In a backyard, they could grab the shot of the man running away from a flying hatchet. "We spent the second shoot day on a ranch in Malibu that had the barn and cow and baseball field," says the director.

He and Acevedo had worked together on a number of videos, most recently for Lenny Kravitz. They agreed that the RED camera was the best option available that could do the high-speed photography they'd planned. Also, Schofield edited the piece himself in Apple Final Cut Pro. (Schofield's "director's cut" was graded at Company 3 by colorist Dave Hussey; the label, Because Music, subsequently posted its own version.) The material was captured as REDCODE files on RED-DRIVEs and CF cards and could be instantly imported into an FCP system without the added steps required for a tape-based system.

Most everything was shot in RED's 3K format (achieved by using only part of the 4K sensor), except for the 120fps slow-motion sequences (a break dancer falling, a shotgun shell flying out of a gun) that came from a 2K crop of the sensor. For Acevedo, this compromise was somewhat frustrating because he was effectively shooting these 2K scenes on a sensor about the size of a 16mm film frame, with the attendant angle of view and depth of field characteristics.

"In order to get a wide shot," the cinematographer says, "I couldn't even use lenses that were designed for 35mm photography. I had to use 16mm lenses that had been Panavised. I wasn't that happy with the look of those shots, although I don't think most people would really notice what I'm talking about."

The cinematographer stresses that the most rewarding aspect of the job was the artistic challenge of finding the one angle that could tell a whole story in the approximately four seconds each shot would be on screen. "There wasn't any coverage," he says, "so I had to light and compose so that the viewer's eye would be drawn right to what's important. We also put hidden 'Easter eggs' in some of the shots that you might notice on a second viewing. Like the guy pouring the alcohol out as the woman looks on in support—next to him, there's somebody just standing there with aluminum foil on his face. You probably won't register that the first time you see it, but it was fun figuring out ways to make those little things work."

Schofield's biggest conceptual challenge came during editing, where he had to make sure that viewers would not be able to accidentally find meaning or a narrative thread in his deliberately random piece. "In my first cut I had too many shots in a row that had food in them," he recalls. "I had to change that. I didn't want viewers to think, 'Oh, I get it! This video is about funny food scenes.'"