Director

El Skid

The latest boyband outfit probably heading for the big time receive an impressively mounted Mondrian-inspired treatment in El Skid/Robin Schmidt's new graphic-fest.

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=fV0GSy_ERgg[/youtube]

Chrome Productions

Hannah Chandler

Carl Burke

Nik P

Saving Aimee’s We’re The Good Guys by El Skid

Saving-Aimee’s-We’re-The-Good-Guys-by-El-Skid

It's a low budget interpretation of 'band in a white studio' performance for Feeder's latest single, evidently involving four weeks of solid post insanity.
Which Robin "El Skid" Schmidt describes below, rather entertainingly...

"El Skid" on making Feeder's Tracing Lines video

"Stuart Gosling made a vid a few years back using three DV cameras set up to shoot three angles at the same time and I wanted to do something similar but green screen so we had lots of guitar arms sticking out at the same time.
"Feeder always seem to look really morose and sombre in their vids so we wanted to do something fun, where they looked like they were having a good time. And the guys are actually a good laugh. We shot three Sony EX1's using the XDCam EX format, one on the right, one on the left and one in the middle. Just a regular green-screen shoot.
"Then the post. With all those takes, shot on Hi-Def, there was a massive amount of footage - and I was doing all the post myself on my own computer. Disaster. My computer's way too slow and I just sat there swearing at it for hours while it tried to work out what I was asking it to do, crunching through keying hundreds of layers in the same shot.
"Finally the graphics card just gave up and started making noises like Harrier jump jet. I had to finish it off at a friend's place. He's a motion graphics artist and was bragging about how fast his machine was. We broke that one too, at three o clock in the morning, and then he started swearing at it and swearing at me for getting him involved.
"We used After Effects to comp it all together, which is a brilliant programme, but when you have 150 layers - all with names like Wide G F, WIde G L, WIde G R - you start to lose the plot really quickly.
"I've never felt like I'd bitten off way more than I could chew this badly before. I was just seeing layers, and stupid 3D camera moves, and every time you made a mistake it disrupted everything that went before, so you had to start from the beginning again. Bit like linear editing except with 150 layers at a time.
"There are lots of references to old Feeder videos, like Buck Rogers and Come Back Around, but I just like the fact that all the technical stuff is technically wrong. The keying is crap, the grading had to be done on a laptop because everything else was broken, and everything's just thrown on top of everything else (normally you edit the shots you want, but here I just put every take in the video). But somehow it all hangs together."

Hannah Chandler/Robin Schmidt

El Skid and Andy Needham

David Rowell

Feeder’s Tracing Lines by "El Skid"

We can't show you all of this, but here's a two minute edit of El Skid's video for folkie troubadour Johnny Flynn, featuring the sad decline of his wooden yet highly expressive lookalike.

El Skid

Director

Videos featuring El Skid

2009 (1)

2008 (2)

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