Arno Salters: Rock, Paper, Scissors
Not only does “Fraud in the 80s” sport a slightly old-timey look, it also pays homage to directors Salters admires. In a nod to the quirky style of Tim Burton, a coil of aluminum wire unfolds to form a flower. And in reference to Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python films, the singers’ heads float against a sky background, their mouths moving in ventriloquist-dummy style as they sing.
Advantages and Challenges
Stop motion affords Salters definite advantages. “There’s this element of 100 percent control over what you’re doing,” he says. “You can limit the obstacles you run into when making a live-action film.”
Of course there were challenges, too, the greatest being the video’s miniscule budget. Salters laughs when asked to number his crew. “Well, for the stop motion the crew was — me! For the live-action shoot, I had about 10 people helping with lighting and sound and so on. Some were friends, others were pros willing to work for very small wages to get a credit for their reels — or in hopes of being hired on a bigger-budget project.”
As for his own time, Salters did make enough to take his wife out to dinner. “I had to at least do that,” he says, “because she did so much of the paper cutting.”
Easy to Go Hybrid
Salters edits on an iMac G5 and sometimes uses an iPod for playback. “Final Cut Pro and QuickTime Pro were key to the success of this project,” he says. After capturing his individual frames in stop motion, Salters turned them into compressed QuickTime clips and brought them into Final Cut Pro for the last round of cutting.
He especially appreciated the seamless connection between his camera and his software. “For the live-action shoot I used the new Panasonic HVX200 video camera, which works great with Final Cut Pro because it has a built-in Import-from- P2-Card function,” he says. “So they’re really easy to use together.”
To Salters’s delight, that seamlessness extends to other applications. “The thing I prefer most about Final Cut Pro is how well it works with other software, be it Apple or not,” he says. “That makes it very easy to develop cross-platform, hybrid filmmaking techniques — which is exactly what I like to do.”
Adds Salters, “I’ve used all the major editing programs, and Final Cut Pro is the one I’m most comfortable with. I use it on every project. The interface is extremely user-friendly, and it’s so affordable. But the best part is, I don’t feel like my ‘cheap’ home production studio presents any sacrifice of quality compared to high-end post production studios. In fact, having my own setup means I can experiment with new techniques — which I couldn’t do at a post house because of cost and time issues.”
Breaking In
Knowing the daunting obstacles green filmmakers face, Salters is strategizing his career. “I went into music videos because it’s so challenging for a young director who’s trying to find his voice to get the funds to make feature movies,” he admits. “Music videos are a way to get other people to fund my experiments.”
He’s building his demo reel with stop-motion animation because, he says, “you get high production value with something that’s quite cheap to do.” With his growing reel, Salters is pleased that the inquiries are “snowballing pretty quickly. My personal success is getting that call where someone says, ‘I saw your video. Will you make one for me?’”
Most of all, he’s focused on developing his own style. “I always try to go with the old approach to effects,” muses Salters. “I could have done something similar to my paper cutouts using 3D animation, but personally I don’t find sharp, perfect computer graphics to be very moving. They can be mind-blowing and impressive, but most of them are not moving.” (He notes a couple of exceptions — CG videos by Björk and Chris Cunningham, which he finds both technically stunning and touching.)
As Salters makes his way into live-action filmmaking — he’s now working on a screenplay for a narrative feature — he has no intention of quitting the style with which he first made his mark. “I’m getting higher-budget projects,” he says happily, “but I’m taking that handmade aesthetic with me.”
