LINKIN PARK ‘UP FROM THE BOTTOM’
We had the exciting honor of helping Linkin Park and their band member, DJ, Producer, director & creative director John Hahn bring their music video, Up from the Bottom, to life. Joe, Mike, and the band wanted to create a video that reflected this feeling of being trapped and boxed in a room in today’s divisive and tense cultural landscape. Feelings of angst, despair, fear, and anxiety are rampant, and they wanted to capture that collective feeling with this performance that they too see and feel as a song and as a band.
THE CONCEPT
& INSPIRATION
THE APPROACH
VIRTUAL PRODUCTION
Joe had the idea of shooting this on a virtual production set. That is, a live set the band will perform in that we film, but shot against a huge video wall that we create our room digitally and place it on. This creates a believable reality. That, then, begins to unravel digitally to surprise viewers when what looks real suddenly doesn’t. Yet still does.
We quickly found that simply recreating real rooms digitally was cool but just not enough. The need to distort the rooms, even more than we set out to, quickly became apparent. Once on set, testing it, what also jumped out was how much more depth we needed to create so that we could feel a sense of space on any given shot.
THE TECHNICAL APPROACH
One of the hidden challenges of virtual production is that you have one of two options. Either a real-time 3d scene made in Unreal Engine or software like it, or 3d renders output in a VR stretched format. Because of a tight timeline with little time to test, we had to go the 3d render route. This posed challenges in knowing where and how to position the rooms on the projection to line up with our stage and talent.
PREVISUALIZATION
Tbh, it was really just fun to make rooms warp. But a huge part of this idea, and the idea that things get weirder was the shape shifting. In 3d, making rooms warp was a breeze. The challenge we discovered was not warping the room so much that it made the talent look like they were floating. Or worse, that we made viewers motion sick.
Joe and Mike referenced the show, Severance, as something they both liked. The eerie sense of being in an office with no rooms felt like the perfect starting point for the video’s approach. But we had to make it our own. A windowless room was not enough to carry an entire video. So the idea of ‘going crazy’ in a room with no escape emerged. The thinking was that it gets weirder and weirder. Walls move and morph and shift. Lights flicker to the music and glitch out. The thinking was that it should feel like either we’re going insane in this room or an outside force is terrorizing us even more while already being trapped there. The band’s performance becomes the emotional reaction to the walls closing in and our minds starting to deconstruct.
ROOM DISTORTIONS
Once we understood how much and how cool it was to start distorting each room, the sky was the limit. Our trippy gloves came off. And we began to experiment with all types of distortions. Especially different speeds that let us animate and warp to different tempos within the song.
LIGHTING
By complete accident just in doing some lighting tests, we discovered the rooms of the light could literally be an equalizer to the music and different stems of the track. This became a very simple way, and in some ways motivated us to simplify the room animation to let the music do the work, simply with light.
THE SHOOT
The big day came for Joe to direct the video in the virtual production set. We knew it would work perfectly. But it was one of those ‘know it when we see it’ moments where even on set the backgrounds looked very different than the band on stage. Production used tricks like lighting the stage with the video feed from the projections. Cropping in close. Blending backgrounds with depth of field, and even split diopters to help also stylize the shot. Add in color correction and it all blended perfectly.
