Director Luc Janin channels the ever-confusing spirit of Escher in this polished promo for Julian Perretta. Pulling up to his stately home with a snake in his back seat (as you do), Julian nonchalantly wanders through all sorts of upside-down, topsy-turvey, backwards stairs trickery.

Of course, there’s a couple of beautiful women trapped inside with him and, as the title suggests, Julian is non too subtle about his intentions. If he can get to them of course.

Luc said: “To be honest, I’ve been looking for the right opportunity to do a video inspired by M.C. Escher’s drawings for a while. When we started exchanging ideas with Julian and I saw what he was planing to for his album artwork with a Chess game and dices, it seemed to come naturally into place.

“Then we look at different options of where to shoot it, and Prague quickly came first with all that it had to offer, including great locations. We had to find somewhere that could work for all the perspective tricks we wanted to create. So, the choice of the location was key to get started on the project.

“As the plan was to create the perspective tricks and optic illusions in camera rather than in 3D, there was quite a bit of geometric calculations and math involved to figure out all the camera angles and make sure they would work together. The spiral staircase for example is made of the same stairs, but shot from 3 different angles. Shooting with a snake was another interesting challenge – another one of these ideas that sound fun on paper but becomes quite tricky on set, as you can imagine snakes are not the best at taking directions…”

Julian Perretta
Naked (Polydor)
Director: Luc Janin
DOP: Jakub Dvorsky
Editor: Phil Currie @ Stitch Editing
Prod: U-man films
Producer: Hervé Humbert
Prague producer: Daniel Heyna-Vetrovsky
Art Director: Petr Kunc
Wardrobe: Tamara Faniot
Post-production: Big Buoy
Colorist: Duncan Russell
Commissioner: Virginie Morette-Bourny