There’s a running joke here at DN that a sure fire way to get my viewing attention is to dedicate at least 60% of your running time to an extended dance sequence – in all honesty, if the moves are good enough I’ll settle for around 40%. While I can’t deny a certain bias towards films featuring a choreographed sequence or two (I blame Hal Hartley), Pijus Vėberis’ Vessels music video for electronica four piece Rasabasa, deserves recognition in it’s own right for it’s single shot voyeuristic traversal through polar bear cohabiting domesticity. Vėberis tells DN how band and filmmakers came together in the flow of production.
The two main inspirations for the video were Twin Peaks for the general mood and Birdman for the more specific look and the one shot idea. The idea took around three weeks to develop to the point where the band and I felt good about it. Meanwhile art directors were gathering props and creating the interiors and our dancer Aistė Burnytė was working on her choreography. The interiors were three abandoned offices, and they were completely empty, so the team had to turn them into apartments using mostly found and borrowed props.
The filming itself took two days and it really was a challenge to manage to shoot everything in time. Post took around a week because we experimented with a number of different approaches, for example in the grading, to achieve the look we were aiming for. We used a GH4, a stabilizer and a wireless focusing system. The hardest thing about making the video was to keep everyone happy and at the same time rush to set the scene while it was 5am in the morning and we had been shooting for 12 hours. We are all really happy with our result, and since the video was a DIY project, with the band being involved in everything from catering to prop scavenging, we all became close on this project and will definitely make another video soon.
