Can't Get You Out Of My Head - ITV This Morning
2020 has been a difficult year for many people. Thos who are freelance - in whatever industry - have been particularly badly hit, with little work and not a lot in the way of government assistance.
I’ve been lucky. After a slightly shaky start, my clients have given me a nice supply of varied work. And I’ve had a regular freelancing job with ITV Daytime. My set up at home and a decent broadband connection meant I easily transitioned from commuting to White City each day to working at my desk in my dining room.
At the end of October, a job appeared in my inbox which piqued my interest: a request from This Morning producer Harry Bott to lift the backgrounds from Kylie Minogue’s 2001 video for ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ so we could superimpose Alison Hammond over the top.
Lifting the backgrounds - i.e. removing Kylie from each shot to give us a set of clean backgrounds sounded like a time-consuming and frustrating job. I had no doubt that a couple of weeks with After Effects’ content-aware fill would probably give us something we could use, but it would be far from perfect. Plus the original video was shot in SD, so upscaling to HD would leave us with a blurry pixelated mess.
What I had in mind was recreating all the backgrounds. I’d used Greyscalegorrila’s City Kit before, and knew that could easily provide the cityscape backdrops for the first half of the video. Render them with Cinema4D’s physical sky and the first half of the video was fairly easy to recreate.
For the dance scenes I had to build a facsimilie of the original white interior. I watched and re-watched the Dawn Shadforth’s original video for Kylie to understand how the curved ceiling worked, added the bezier-like windows and went about lighting the scene in a way which would be easy to animate to the beat of the music.
The shoot took place just over a week before TX. And a delay in the edit booking meant I didn't get the final edit until the morning of Friday 6th November. The sequence now had 55 shots. Quite an increase from the 15 which had been originally storyboarded. Lifting a key from the green screen was a fairly easy task using Keylight in After Effects. There were obviously problems with green screen. A combination of shallow depth of field and a slow shutter speed always liven up trying to lift a clean key, but I’m not going to dwell on those…
The whole thing started to come together Friday afternoon. Copious use of VideoCopilot’s Optical Flares helped complete the look, and by the end of the day the car sequence was almost complete.
The dance scene I put together over the weekend and between other jobs on Monday and Tuesday morning. By Tuesday evening I was tweaking keys, adjusting the glow around Alison and generally tidying up.
The final project was delivered 24 hours ahead of TX.
The video went out as part of a set up to an Alison Hammond / Kylie interview on ITV’s This Morning on November 12th 2020. It got a good response, with Kylie fan’s giving it a lot of love online.
The Daily Mail said:
but it was the HuffPost headline which made me smile:
Alison Hammond's Video Tribute To Kylie Minogue Is Genuinely Frame-For-Frame Perfect
It was a fun job to do. And it made people smile. And in a year like 2020, that seems kind of important.