Nights & Weekends
Fading Light
Music Video, 2018
VFX Supervision, Design, Composite
Overview
What does love look like at the end of the world? This was the question director Justin Tyler Close used to brief me on his latest music video. Our first project together, we quickly discovered a mutual love of science and symoblism and I worked to weave those visuals into his raw and emotive filmmaking.
I imagined a black hole to be a beautiful but ominous presence throughout the film. Looming in the sky, It represents inevitability and our mortality. From this imagery, we subtly weaved this theme of "gravity" into the narrative and choreography – a sense of weight and growing lightness as the world succumbs to an otherworldly force.
Fading Light premiered on Nowness in 2018
created at Substrate
R&D
In an exercise of extreme overkill, I created an approximation of Kip Thorne’s black hole model from the movie Interstellar. Instead of creating the effect computationally, I used a series of concentric “lenses” with an increasing index of refraction graduated towards the center. The result approximates the increasing gravity of a black hole by bending the path of raytraces as they intersect each lens.
Credits
Production
Production Company: Arts & Sciences, Ring the Alarm
Director / Writer: Justin Tyler Close
Director of Photography: Norm Li, CSC
1st Assistant Camera: Jeremy Cox
Choreographer: Jasmine Albuquerque
Assistant Producer: Emily Roe
Editor: Danica Pardo
Visual Effects: Christopher Fung
Sound Designer: Eddie Kim
Sound Assistant: Dillon Cahill
Starring: Troian Bellisario, Raymond Ejiofor
Therapy Group: Ari Basile, Arne Gjelten, Babar Peerzada, Carly Foulkes, Emily Roe, Kristen Montgomery, Maria Rubio, Tomek Sadurski, Ves Phillippi
Press
Nowness
https://www.nowness.com/series/lovesick/nights-weekends-fading-light-justin-tyler-close