After wooing us last year with the intoxicating infatuation of Spectrum of Love, Ibon Landa returns with a more tempered view of the life cycle of a couple’s romance in Gloomy Planets for Nubla. Shot out of hours around a commercial project, Ibon tells DN how he beat the clock to pull off this bookended story of the birth and death of a relationship.
Nubla is one of my best friend’s girlfriend. He is also my partner at Bungalow, my production company. Nacho sent me Nubla´s new album and when I heard the Gloomy Planets song I told him that I wanted to do the music video. This song talks about being trapped and how we can make the same mistake over and over again. With this premise and in a sequence we see in an alternative way the first and last date of a young couple. The contrast between the idealization of the first time, combined with the deterioration of the last, show us the most perverse side of personal relationships.
I started thinking that it was impossible to do what I wanted.
The best part was that Nubla love the idea and she gave me 100% freedom. The worst part was the budget. We needed to become creative. At that time a fragrance brand hired me to do a commercial. It was three days shooting. I told my shooting crew that I wanted to do this videoclip and I needed their help. I’m so grateful that all of them said yes. We shot it at an old karting track with 2 actors and 12 extras, all of them friends of Nubla.
We only had the location until 2 am and we finished shooting the commercial around 18:00 or so. We arrived at the location around 19:30 so we didn’t have much time for the shoot. At the beginning it was hard because we needed time to do some rehearsals, steady mechanical shots and set everything up. You need to keep in mind that if you want to do this perfectly you need a motion control, but this was far beyond our budget. Around 21:00 I started thinking that it was impossible to do what I wanted as we needed two perfect sequence shots in just 3 hours. But we made it and the effort was worth it. It was a 2 minutes sequence shot because we wanted to play it in slow motion (50fps) for the 4 minute song.
After the shoot I started postproduction at Bungalow. We did a rough edit and we started talking about the transitions, when and how we could do them. Marco Petrucci and Jonas Nunes did a great job, everything flows perfectly. I also worked with Catarina Alves for the titles who did a great job as well. I’m very happy with the video, especially if you consider all the restrictions we had to overcome.
