Arno Salters: Rock, Paper, Scissors
Arno Salters is a music video director who’s earning raves for his playful fusion of live action and stop-motion animation film techniques. Made on a Mac with Final Cut Pro, Salters’s videos are jaunty fantasies with a touch of vaudeville and a handcrafted style whose slight irregularities bring them to unusually vivid life.
“What I’m trying to get out of is that glossy, sterile, corporate look the music video industry has sunk to, where everything looks and sounds the same,” explains Salters. “People consider the industry to be in crisis right now, so most labels are afraid to be different — everything they make is a replica of everything else out there.”
Salters’s work stands out because he applies his Mac-based toolset to achieve a non-CG look. It’s especially apparent in his latest music video — for the song “Fraud in the ’80s,” from the album “Bring It Back” by the husband-and-wife duo Mates of State.
“One thing I went for aesthetically in the ‘Fraud in the ’80s’ video is the in-camera effect,” he says. “Everything I do is right in front of the camera, as opposed to using CG effects. To me, that gives it a certain look. It’s the human-error factor: it has charm. And it’s the imperfectness of that that I like.”
The 27-year-old French-born director, who splits his time between San Francisco and Paris, is proud of how his ultra-low-budget, indie-produced work turned out. “It’s gotten as much airplay as any indie video,” he says. “Fraud in the ’80s” has played on MTVU, MTV2, LOGO, and YouTube and is available on the iTunes Music Store.
Low-Cost and Lickety-Split
Working with his production company, Spy Entertainment, Salters set out to craft a music video whose high production values would belie its bare-bones budget.
The project was not only low-cost, but lickety-split. Salters liked the song and jumped at the chance. “It seemed like a good opportunity and I enjoy working with local artists,” he says. (Mates of State is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.) “So I wrote a treatment involving paper cutouts, they approved it, and I made the video in three weeks.”
The video centers on a whimsically painted chest whose drawers pop open and closed to the beat of the song. Salters combines live action of the musicians performing the song with frame-by-frame stop-motion animation of 2D paper cutouts of the pair perched inside the drawers.
Sync to the Song
Production began with a one-day shoot of the band in a San Francisco studio. Salters took the live action footage into Final Cut Pro for editing, selected the shots he liked, then matched them to the song in the timeline.
“I had to make sure the stop motion would be in sync with the music after I added the song back onto the cut,” he explains. “So before I shot the stop-motion animation, I brought the song into the 24 fps Final Cut Pro timeline and I found all my edit points in advance — so I’d know exactly how long each shot would be, down to the frame. It was all pre-planned and pre-edited. That’s the advantage with stop motion,” adds Salters. “You can map the frames to the song timeline.”
To conserve paper, Salters laid out as many of the credit-card-sized images as would fit — about eight to 12 — onto each 8.5- x 11-inch sheet. He printed the sheets, carefully labeled each frame so he would know where it belonged in a sequence and with the help of Wendy (his wife) and a sharp pair of scissors, manually cut out about 2,500 of the 5,760 digital stills (that’s 24 fps x 60 secs/min x 4 for the four-minute song) of bandmates Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel.
Creating Stop-Motion Animation
Salters recreated live action by re-shooting his paper cutouts in frame-by-frame stop motion, making sure they’d be in sync with the song. He filmed the cutouts on his “set” (the miniature chest of drawers) using a Canon digital still camera at 12 fps doubled, then sent the images straight into Final Cut Pro on his iMac G5 via FireWire and Canon capture software.
27-year-old French-born director Arno Salters splits his time between San Francisco and Paris.
“With stop-motion animation, you can shoot in ones (24 fps) or twos (12 fps), where each frame is shot twice,” explains Salters. “Shooting double still gives you 24 fps, but it’s a slightly more jerky look — it’s the style used in most European works, like ’Wallace and Gromit’ — and I prefer it. Plus,” he adds with a grin, “it takes half the patience.”
