DAVID WILSON TACKLES MOTHER NATURE

Up-and-coming promo posterboy David Wilson takes us to the top of The Truman Brewery with his latest project for Little Boots.

The elements of nature; really impressive when caught at the right moment, a real pain to control when you’ve got a film crew waiting for that precise magical moment. Well, that’s what I’d set out to do for the promo for Little Boots’ new track “Earthquake”.

This was my first ever night shoot, and I chose to tackle it on the top of The Old Truman Brewery just off Brick Lane in East London. It was such a beautiful location. I chose it especially for its generic, slightly New York look - with the financial district in the background, and huge piping structures still in place from its working brewery days. We shot all the close-up shots during the day inside some of the derelict rooms at the top of the building, and this was also where we tackled the effect of levitating water, which can be seen in the second verse of the promo.

This was one of the main technical achievements of the shoot, with this surreal effect being produced all in camera. We created a specially designed water rig that would create droplets at a set rate of 12 drops a second, and we synced this rate of droplets with the camera’s frame rate. By matching these two elements, we created the impression that the droplets were stationary in the air, although what you’re actually seeing on screen is a different set of droplets in each frame of the footage.

The timing had to be extremely precise so that the next droplets would replace the current droplets on screen at exactly the right moment in order to create the illusion that it was just one droplet being held in mid-air. That’s why, if you look closely at the footage, the droplets have that slight vibration to them.

Once we’d achieved a static levitation we could tweak the flow of water so that the droplets went slightly out of sync with the camera, which give us that surreal backwards waterfall effect. It was fantastic to have conquered that barrier of achieving something so super-natural in camera.

Once nighttime had fallen it was time to get Victoria (Little Boots) out on the roof, and get her performing. The turnover between takes was extremely quick as we only had five hours of night-time before we the end of the shoot. During the process we had our very own mini-Hindenberg disaster by managing to destroy our main light source (a 12 foot helium filled balloon light) via the wind battering it into some industrial piping, and Victoria managed overcome her genuine vertigo in order to give us a great levitation shot at the end of the promo.

So despite mother nature giving us a little bit of a battering we survived pretty much unscathed with a pretty surreal pop promo to show for it. I hope you enjoy it.