BEHIND THE SCENES: Fokofpolisiekar – Droom Hoog
The idea of doing a photo-based video came from myself and Liam Lynch collaborating on a photo exhibition dealing with the 3month period around Fokofpolisiekar‘s recording of ‘Droom Hoog’. The band released our first full-length album in 10 years, titled Selfmedikasie, last year so the last thing fans would’ve expected was another short release so quickly afterwards. The album was written and recorded in 3 weeks as everyone involved in this band have various other musical projects and commitments.
Around the time I started hanging out with our old long-time photographer, Liam Lynch, as he was interested in my involvement with Fujifilm and wanted to know more about the cameras. We decided to get Liam in touch with Hein Hough from Fujifilm and get him hooked up with a X100F and that he would document the recording process at @Sunset Studios in Stellenbosch (and a couple of select shows) and I would document the subsequent European tour and that we would do an exhibition of said photos. The band would also be able to use the pics as press materials. After doing our selection of 20 pictures for the exhibition we realized that there were so many pictures that we liked but realistically we couldn’t exhibit, which led to the idea of getting our friend @Ruan Vermeulen from Bewilder.TV involved in making a motion-based video from these images.
Ruan and his team were responsible for animating Liam’s images for the 2009 Fokofpolisiekar documentary ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do’. Liam himself has also in the past made a video out of images for the Fokofpolisiekar song ‘Skynheilg’ which documented the band’s European tour of 2006. Having people that share such a long history with the band working on this video and the fact that the Fujifilm images look so good made the idea seem like a no-brainer.
The process basically involved myself and Liam handing the guys from Bewilder.TV our jpeg selects and they came up with the flow and did the rest. The animators also used the album artwork created by Merwe Marchand le Roux and @Hunter Kennedy for little cutaway bits.
I’m very stoked with how the video came out. The video perfectly documents the last couple of months with the band and it packs a nice punch. What I’ve always loved about the Fujifilm cameras is that the pictures look great coming straight out of camera and allows me to shoot photos and not worry about struggling for hours in front of a computer to realise the image I initially saw – in this instance it was Bewilder.TV that did that for us!
