Studio Reveals the Process of Making The Chemical Brothers Video with a Dancing Girl

Industry February, 7 2016 Nikolay Udintsev

The Mill, a studio which does special effects, talked about the process of making a video for Wide Open, a song by The Chemical Brothers.

In this video, created with one long take, Sonoya Mizuno dances, and her body gradually turns into a hollow frame, which looks like the 3D-printed parts.

At first, the creators of the video planned to film it with the help of several shots, which would have been put together during postproduction later. However, they had to give up on this idea, as it would have made the differences in light visible. To have more room during postproduction, the video was made with an Arri Alexa camera with an increased height of the frame.

Before the shoot, Mizuno’s body was scanned, and her 3D-model was built based on this data. During the process, she had to make some of the dance moves in a motion capture suit. The room was also scanned and reproduced as a 3D-model. All of this information was later used to replace Mizuno’s body with hollow structures.

Despite the large amount of data, most shots needed manual processing and animation: to replace the arm for a 3D-model or to correct light and the position of structures.