In honour of the new Navis Freebird, the three musketeers of the camcorder, Julien Regnier, Julien Eustache and Flo Bastien have made a video taking into account the neurodegenerative dimension of modern homo sapiens, a format suitable for mobile phones held in the vertical position.
Felix Olsson
We are living in a fantastic epoch. Discussions in the black crows offices at the end of the summer were not the reminiscences of a dream. A fraction of a second, a movement of the wrist, an Insta thing… For Julien Regnier, always at the forefront of technical challenges of modernity, it was necessary to try a video in vertical format in order to adapt to the immediate (and disillusioned) attention of mobile phone viewers. Just like flies or moths, humans are attracted by light, so much so that it is now common to see couples plunging face to face and simultaneously onto their phones during a dinner in a restaurant.
This contemporary tragedy of love has, however, its limits : the vertical holding of the phone. Woe to the member of said couple who would have the gall to turn their phone horizontally because, at that precise moment, one of the two will no longer be consulting any messages of high importance or none-the-less essential social media, but without doubt will be watching a video. And there, whether it is a mystery being viewed or imaginary worlds carrying the spectator away, far away from the loved one seated a few centimetres from his body while waiting for the shrimp fritters cooked with ginger, it would be out of line, and it could wreck the evening. So, our three musketeers have come to the rescue of lovers who want to have a calm little movie at the restaurant in front of their loved ones without their companions knowing anything.
Julien Eustache
To do that it is necessary to tinker with the cameras because they are for the moment devised for horizontal formats. “We filmed everything vertically so we had to construct a rig (camera support Ed.) to fix the camera in a vertical position. It took me a day to find the right solution and to make the metal pieces so that it could work. Instead of the 16:9 , we filmed in 9:16,” explained Julien Eustache, responsible for the images and co-producer with Julien Regnier. “And, as in this position, the camera motors were too close to the rig, it was necessary to fabricate further pieces to move the camera away and thus maintain control of the focus and opening.” The technical requirements of the shoot were also revealed by the image frequency required for the camera aspect. In order to have a frame rate fast enough to maintain good clarity of spinning skiers, one has to be able to open the aperture sufficiently. “As for cinema, filters were used in order to be able to stay at 50 frames per second and keep the sharpness despite the movement. This is not something currently common in videos, but we really wanted this cinematic look.”
Julien Eustache
As for the shoot, just as luck often favours those who are bold, it was a beautiful day on the Saas Fee glacier, in Switzerland, and the snow was perfect. “Everything went as planned. The conditions made filming easy with hard snow conditions which didn’t track too much allowing for making several descents; and with a good light. Moreover there weren’t many people in the resort and virtually nobody skiing off-piste so, really, we were undisturbed,” explained Flo Bastien who played the role of the ski tourer. Skiing on a glacier means that it is necessary to take a guide, in this case Serge Thélin. “For the last scene the skiers were very close to a crevasse and we want to reiterate that we had a guide with us because what we were doing are not things that are usually done on a glacier,” Julien Eustache wished to clarify. In the end, the difficulties of this shoot were wind related for the final scene filmed with a drone and getting used to the vertical format for the shots. “With this format, the figures leave the frame very quickly so at the beginning I missed two or three moments of action. It took me time to adapt”. Considering the number of couples that it will save from a domestic scene in the midst of a restaurant it is not a high price to pay.
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