Video Work: Smiler – ‘DeLorean (ft. Wretch 32)’
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This video differed from previous briefs insofar as rather than editing together footage shot for a specific purpose, it was a mash-up of pre-existing footage, re-appropriated to match a song. Given that the song is called ‘DeLorean’ and the lyrics reference “Doc Brown”, it should be pretty obvious what that source material is.
For the most part, I chose to stick to taking clips from the first two Back To The Future films. They share enough visual tones that mixing and matching them was relatively easy – I made the call fairly early on in the editing process to exclude the third film from my source material as the Old West palate would visually contrast too much with the rest of the footage. For some of the close-ups of various machinery, I took clips from Spike TV’s 2010 recreation of the original teaser trailer. The only shot I used from the original version of the teaser trailer was the cut to Michael J Fox wearing sunglasses – while the quality of the 2010 re-shoot was higher and would better match the rest of the footage I was using in that regard, using footage of the actor from today wouldn’t work in context with his mid/lates 1980s self in the rest of the edit.
Although my use of it is fairly low key until right at the end, I’m particularly pleased with some of the image masking I’ve used in this video – combined with push wipes at less obvious angles, it creates a really eye-catching effect. It’s definitely a technique I plan on refining and using in future video projects. It was inspired in part by the video to ‘Reaching Out’ by Nero, although I tried to keep it more subdued in this video. While Nero’s video is intended as a pastiche of the Miami Vice credit sequence, here I was aiming for an edit that was rawer and a bit less glossy.
