The video clip of the song that is literally on everyone’s lips these days, “Bzrp. Music Session #53″, explosive alliance between the producer bizarre and the Colombian singer Shakiraincludes black and white illustrations made with a technique called rotoscoping mixed with stop motion, in homage to “Take on me” -famous song by the Norwegian band a-ha from the 80s–, a work that was carried out by the Argentine filmmaker julia countresponsible for visual effects (vfx) of the video clip.
(Telam)
The hit with spicy lyrics that the Colombian dedicates to her ex-husband, the Catalan Gerard Piqué, which has become the song in Spanish with the best debut in the history of both YouTube and Spotify, pays homage to one of the most successful tracks of the 80s, whose initial melody (riff) is quickly recognizable by millions around the world, a anthem whose video was revolutionary for the time. For this sessions, bizarre worked with the particular audio of his synthesizers and together with Shakira they searched for a spirit linked to the 80s with characteristic sounds in a modern and at the same time nostalgic hyper-pop track. The lyrics, meanwhile, are a confessional discharge from the Colombian to her ex, father of her two children: “I only make music, sorry that it splashes you.”
“Tribute to my favorite video clip of all time for this theme,” the Argentine audiovisual filmmaker and producer wrote in a post on her social networks (@julitaconde). julia countspecialized in animation (techniques such as stop motion, live action and 3D), passionate about surreal painting, whose art reaches millions of people thanks to the work she does in videos but also in the visuals of shows by artists of the urban genre such as Thunder, Lit Killah, khea, cazzu, Emilia Mernes and his own bizarre.
(Telam)
At the age of 23, Conde became the leading figure in a generational aesthetic whose references are the exponents of urban music: he has made the teaser for the session between bizarre and the mexican Snow That Productor the visuals in the shows of Emilia Mernes. Now, she spent a whole week in her room in the house that she lives with her family to make this video clip that has her as an animator: hundreds and hundreds of freehand drawings of the Colombian with bare feet and a zen patience to go rotating the figures, their gestures, the arms, until giving it the right movement.
(Telam)
“The tribute we wanted to do was very specific and that result could only be achieved by drawing by hand drawing by drawing,” he says. Count about the patient and artisan work that the video clip of the new Session demanded of him –which he also shared on his networks– and that shows the more than 200 drawings of Shakira with graphite, manipulated frame by frame, until the appropriate effect is achieved. According to the animator, the time that each job takes, with a client or with an artist, always depends on the comings and goings in which the progress is shown: “In this case, in general, everything was liked quickly and it took us a week , about”.
Rotoscoping is an animation technique based on the creation of animated sequences by drawing the images of a real video, frame by frame, which Disney popularized with his first film. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and that Count resumes to pay homage to the video of a-haaccording to his account, one of his “favorite video clips of all time”.
(Telam)
“A wolf like me is not for guys like you,” she sings Shakira during the song, at the exact moment when the microphone in the recording studio is taken by the illustrations that turn it into a monochrome animation, which gives the video “a nice texture, it gives the idea of going back in time, of something more analogue”, adds Count about the creation that is breaking records for listeners, reproductions and streams. ”In some shots I crumple the paper, then stretch it, flatten it, so that it returns to its original pose. It looks like a wrinkled texture, in a chroma I take photos one by one, and then in digital that chroma is erased and everything that needs to be retouched is retouched, such as color correction. Then we add it to the video clip so that it integrates as well as possible ”, explains Conde about the meticulous work that she carried out as an animator of Session 53.
(Telam)
In reference to the technique, the director says that “there are many haters of rotoscoping. Grace is the end result you give to work. The texture you give it, whether you rotoscope with paint, pencil or digital, is not the same. The funny thing is not just how much it took you to find the movement. Many thought it was an Instagram filter but no, I did it with graphite, with a pencil. If I didn’t do drawing by drawing, the reference we wanted would not be so clear, it would not have that eighties feeling that we were looking for”, opined the young audiovisual director of the video that also houses the flagship aesthetic that refers to the home studio that the producer he had in his family home in the town of Ramos Mejía in the Buenos Aires suburbs.
In recent years, Count He has already done multiple jobs with Gonzalo Julian Conde (Bizarrap), in session teasers, in the visual part and on the screens of their shows and in other advertisements. Conde, who studied at the Universidad del Cine, has already participated in festivals around the world with his first short, thorns, animated with the stop motion technique, that is, frame by frame, and inspired by a family trip to El Hornocal, Jujuy. He achieved great visibility from his work with bizarrethe highly successful music producer who is breaking audience records worldwide with his sessions.
(Telam)
How did you get interested in this technique? The filmmaker remembers it like this: “My mom bought us a box full of DVDs that she had The fantastic wandering castleof ghibli –which to this day is my favorite movie–, plus several of Art Attack, as well as one of wallace and gromit. They were the three DVDs that we had, we spent the time watching that with my sisters. I’ve seen it 200 times. I already knew what stop motion was.” Regarding the keys to this technique, she notes: “Patience, more than anything, patience. You manage all the other things, in reality the stop motion movement is a complete lie, when you learn to lie it does itself. You are all the time fighting with gravity, which is a problem that you don’t have in other techniques. When you learn certain tricks, the only thing left is that to get an animation you have to spend hours and hours and bank it”.
—Did you imagine that the video of Shakira and Bizarrap was going to go viral like this?
-I really do not know. I mean, I’m used to what he does goes very well, apart from the dedication that we always do everything, he, his team. It’s like I don’t stop to think about it. But yes, when the subject came up it was like ‘ah, of course, it’s true, it was true that it was going to generate this tremendous thing’. I was surprised because I hadn’t thought of it. In fact, when we talked about doing the animation, I immediately began to think about how to do it, about the technique; It was like at first I hadn’t given a lot of attention to who the song was with, until at one point I told him: ‘Ah, it’s with Shakira, tremendous.’
