Street Spirit Effects

Many advanced visual effects were pretty obvious in Radioheads’ Street spirit video clip although it was released on 1996. From the first glance you would think these effects were accomplished using After Effects or similar post production suite. But I don’t think such programs were powerful to such degree back then. However, after some research using the director’s name “Jonathan Glaze” I found some interesting things regarding that particular video.

Final cut is the deepest

Improvised on the spot or months in the planning, a great promo can give a song life after the charts. Sam Delaney talks to directors about their favourite clips

I'd had this idea for ages that I'd seen in nature programmes, where they'd film an eagle flying at 1,200 frames per second then cut frames out to slow it down. It's a technique you see in every second ice-cream commercial nowadays but back then it was new.
(Jonathan Glazer on Radiohead's Street Spirit (1996))

Article by Sam Delaney
The Guardia, Sat 24 Sep 2005 click here
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/sep/24/popandrock1

From Wikipedia

Street Spirit Music Video

Several scenes in the video are shot using different frame frequencies, thus making different subjects in the same scene move at different speeds. A special ultra-high speed camera, normally used to photograph high speed projectiles for scientific purposes, was used to create the extreme slow motion effects.

Click here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_Show_Host#Music_video

Personally, to recreate the effect where you see the lead singer moving in normal speed while others in the back ground move in a slower speed, I would theoretically utilize the following steps:

1- Two different subjects in two different positions on the same set within the same camera frame.

2- Two different subjects filmed doing two different routines

3- One and same Background with not moving fixtures

4- One fixed in position camera

5- Overlapping the two images in post production

6- Merging the two images at the centre point and adjusting the middle zone opacity to blend in or just cropping the converging edges of the two images to equal 50/50.

Time Warp

This is another interesting link that shows high speed cameras in action. I also wanted to note that in BBC's major documentary "Planet Earth" they used the same type of camera to capture High Def motion pictures.

Written by Sam Meddaka click here to go to my blog