Azel Phara 'Green' by Bif

Bif, a directing collective made up of Jules Janaud and Fabrice Le Nezet, have created this mesmerizing video for emerging Parisian electronic artist Azel Phara's track Green, where nature is transformed and humanity is threatened by mass, ultra-colourful weaponisation. It's a counter-intuitive tour de force of imaginative motion design, pushing the envelope of CG animation and motion capture.

Bif - who have been working together since being students at the Supinfocom Graphic Design & Animation school in the early Noughties, and are now based at The Mill in London. Their other recent work includes work for Ataxia and the opening titles for the Playgrounds 2014 festival held in Amsterdam. We asked them a few questions about the making of the video. 

PROMO NEWS: Is this your first ever music video? How did the project come about, and how did you come up with the idea?

Bif: We’ve only directed one other promo a while back for a French band called We Are Enfant Terrible. We’ve always been interested in directing more and when Azel came up with this track we were super excited to get involved.

Initially we wanted to create a film about a chase of some sort and, after listening to the track,
thought it would be interesting to push this idea forward, creating an action sequence between nature, human kind and war machines. The idea was to also to create something with contrast, leading us to develop a happy, bright colour palette, which contrasts with the virile and violent actions.

The basis of the Green promo appears to be live action footage. How much of it did you shoot yourselves?

No live action or stock footage was actually used on this project, the whole thing was created entirely in CG. 

What gives the impression of live action is the fact we used motion capture for the running sequence and worked the CG camera moves in the best way possible to give a naturalistic and cinematic mood to the film. By reducing the number of shots we created, we managed to free ourselves up to edit together rich and intense action sequences.

What was the biggest challenge that you faced in creating the video?

The main challenge was creating a graphical, raw look in 3D whilst also creating an intense, cinematic and entertaining film.