onestep

Existing somewhere within the nebulous intersection of the short film and the music video, Clément Oberto’s One Step pairs dreamlike, hyper slow motion images shot in the Mojave desert with the ethereal sounds of electronic composer John Tejada. Oberto explains how he and his team of trusted collaborators took advantage of access to an idle camera to make their way towards a contemplation on love, time and life trajectory.

I was in LA for business when my friend Ernesto Lomeli said: “Hey Clément my Phantom is not rented this week. Would you like to do something?”. I was excited to play with the camera so I wrote a voice over, while walking alone at night in the streets of South Pasadena. My friend John Hennequin was in LA too, so he helped with finding the Muah team and model Olya Dzuba. I asked to my friend Joe Tong, who I met in Cannes a few month ago, if he wanted to play in a short film, we bought some colored smoke, a bunch of donuts, drove to the Mojave desert and played with different speeds on the Phantom Flex 4K, such as 1830fps, which was sometimes too much…

I met John Tejada few month ago on another trip to LA through the band Plaid whom with I had collaborated on my previous short. So when I went back to the US the next time and we started to speak about shooting something, I asked him if he would like to do the soundtrack. Back in Paris I recorded the voice over at Brodkast Studio and sent it to John with approximately 15 minutes of footage so we could start to talk about something. We had a lot of cool e-mails… mostly during the night looking for the best way to create something beautiful. It was a really nice collaboration, the first draft he sent was amazing and I had a lot of pleasure working with him, he is great.

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I asked Bandits Production if they could help me with a personal project – I needed a few hours with a Flame artist to add the blue smoke when they hug. I had the chance to work with Bruno Maillard who is an amazing VFX talent and in addition, a very kind person. He totally nailed it and I went back to my office with some amazing shots and started the color grading process.

The whole project took about a month and a half to complete: shot at the end of October, finished mid-December, and released mid-January. Everybody was so lovely and happy to participate in this project. I feel lucky to have had the chance to work with all these great people, thank you guys.

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