This Wednesday, ‘Burning Daylight’, the song with which Mia Nicolai and Dion Cooper represent the Netherlands at the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool, was announced. Including video clip, in which the duo move separately through different spaces. A difficult conversation in a restaurant, an argument in the living room. They each lie on their bed in their own bedroom, to eventually find each other on stage in a bar. You see something, but actually not at all. As a viewer you should know that Mia and Dion have never been in all those rooms.
The video clip is directed by Gregory Samson, the production house behind Bruut Amsterdam, of which Deniz Alkac is the founder. When Samson presented his idea for the video, it immediately became clear: this is only feasible with a Hollywood budget, says Alkac. “Gregory wanted to depict two parallel worlds. Like ‘The Upside Down’ in hit series Stranger Things – you are going through the same thing, you are in the same place, but you cannot reach each other.” Filming at six different locations just didn’t really fit the amount that AVROTROS reserves annually for the Eurovision number.
Moreover, the Dutch entry is traditionally kept secret until the official presentation. Alkac: “Filming at different locations also turned out to be difficult for that reason, because try making a video clip without loud music.” This is how the team finally arrived at ‘virtual production’, a new technique that came over from Hollywood and is rarely used in the Netherlands. Virtual production makes it possible to design film locations completely virtually in a studio. More than half of the scenes in the Star Wars series The Mandalorians was filmed that way, for example.
More beautiful effect
The technology can best be compared to a green screen, with the difference that the ‘screen’ consists entirely of LED screens. A very large television, twenty-two meters high and eight meters wide. But, Alkac emphasises, the technique is fundamentally different from working with a green screen. Alkac: “In the latter case, you virtually replace the color green for a different background afterwards. This has disadvantages for the actor, who has to empathize with a green environment. But it also has cinematographic disadvantages: depth of field is lost. The background that is added later is always sharp.” With virtual production, the background is already shown on LED screens during filming. The camera can therefore treat the background as a real background, including perspective. Moreover, that background is virtual, so that the space can adapt to the camera’s point of view. And that also gives a nicer effect.
Of course, this technique is also expensive, says Alkac. But within his company, which mainly produces commercials, he hopes to use it more often in the future. Alkac: “In the advertising world it is completely normal to fly to Cape Town in a shit and a fart. If you can now reach such locations virtually, that is no longer necessary.” Better for the climate, says Alkac, and sometimes also for the budget: for the six locations in the music video for ‘Burning Daylight’, he only needed two days of shooting. And that saves a few days of hiring people. Alkac: „The video clip for the Eurovision Song Contest is an international prestige thing. As a maker, you want to make the most of it within the limits of the budget – show what you can do.”
Is virtual production a climate-friendly solution for the film industry? Which can. But in Hollywood, the technique seems to be mainly an alternative to a green screen. Thus became Star Wars series Andor again ‘just’ filmed in the United Kingdom. The Scottish highlands turned out to be a perfect location for the planet Aldhani – so you all travel there together.