So guys, are you fine? Today we suggest you Giudizio Universatile, a single by Dente, a young and beautiful Italian songwriter whom we could define indie-pop, even if I’m sure he wouldn’t totally agree. The video realizing happened last May. We talked to the director, Fabio D’Orta, and asked him a thousand questions about his works, inspirations and attitudes. He makes skyscrapers explode into gigantic animals and is used to transform piles of debris into truly poetic images, so I’m sure you’ll enjoy to have a conversation with him.

WPD: Tell us about your education and your outset in the world of videomaking.

Fabio d’Orta: I’ve always been interested to art at 360′, I’ve been a theater and advertising set designer, experimenting stop-motion animation in times when it wasn’t fashionable and when youtube was yet really far from being created, designing hand-drawn characters and scenery, filling up my poor house. At the time there wasn’t a great interest towards stop-motion, so I begun to be interested into 3D animation and all I needed to know about how to have total control on the visuals.
From all this was born the project NEON, a short video in which has flown all my interest toward different cinema techniques. I couldn’t find an adequate office for the location, so I built a five meters mock-up, building chairs, computers and so on in perfect scale. Unfortunately today of all that work still exist just a trailer, but for me it is the first piece of my research.

WPD:  Verdena‘s Isacco nucleare has been one of the first videoclips you’ve directed. I remember that there was a contest for the production and you’ve won with a genius idea: the possibility to write in the sky. Where did you find inspiration for this video?

 
Fabio d’Orta: Verdena‘s video is born thanks to the will to use the city space, Milan, as a media to give life to something creative and unusual. The idea was born almost by itself, thinking about a character that wander in the city looking for something, looking at a map as he is a foreigner. Suddenly the attention is focused on the map and how this could become the media to give life to an unreal element and how this powerful tool could go out of hand. The video won the contest and was a true fulfillment, since it was my first video.

WPD:  You often realize declined urban scenery, with a heavy sky upon dead buildings. Then something happens that redeem this decadent reality: in Ministri‘s Tutta roba nostra you made explode from skyscrapers gigantic animals, in Hollow mountains of debris create evocative images. Why this recurrent theme?

 
Fabio d’Orta: I like to think about space as a case of complex structures, as they would be a fainted frame of something important that’s about to happen. I think that I have, at least in videos, a “statuesque” approach, that leads me to think about interactions with the surrounding space. The scenery I make is often nordic and without time, this is because I’m interested in evoke a dreamlike and solemn mood which gives importance to what is about to happen.

WPD:  Another theme that comes to the sight is the suspension. Sometimes the objects fly calmly in the air, like in Negrita‘s Balloons or in Brucerò per te, or, as in Dente‘s Giudizio Universatile, they whirlingly twirl. Tell us about this inclination to put objects mid-air.

 
Fabio d’Orta: It’s a strange thing that belongs to my sensitivity, I like to create a set of elements that live in an “alien” time, dilated as when you see a slow-motion explosion. This setting magic hypnotize me and gives me the possibility to create colored drawings. The subjects sometimes find themselves into this context and they become the central focus of the movement as in the case of Dente‘s video, in which the subject is both active and passive. The speed and complexity are liked to the song needs; Negrita‘s video, as an example, is suspended in time as if it’s a memory which has been stuck in the ambient because the song had smooth sounds and a delicate topic. Dente‘s video is instead dynamic and changeable, exactly as the song.

WPD:  Let’s now talk about how you made Giudizio Universatile. Where did you shoot? Why did you choose to use illuminated signs?

 
Fabio d’Orta: The video has been shot in Rome, the shooting has two distinct moments, the first was in a beach at Torvaianica, and the second in a studio using a green screen, with the help of a stunt coordinator. The signs are linked to a location idea that was intriguing for me and we wanted to evoke, in particular Las Vegas desert, where you can find huge graveyards of abandoned illuminated signs.

WPD:  You’ve directed several videoclips. How do you approach this genre? Do you create a concept with the band or do you develop one by yourself?

 
Fabio d’Orta: Since I don’t have a descriptive approach to the song, I usually listen to the music and let the visuals come from nowhere. Then I find myself in the more complex phase: explain the madness that has come to my mind. Usually I do research the more I can on the vision that the band has in their work, and I try to find a compromise that satisfy both the parts. I always tried to avoid to accept videos in which I had a precise script to fulfill, because usually I’m summoned by whom is interested in my work, and I have to say, everyone had always gave me freedom.

WPD:  We are interested in knowing how is the video-making world in Italy. Is there an underground scene that produces new ideas? Do you find yourself in it?

 
Fabio d’Orta: There is an interesting scene do independent work with a lot of effort. Let’s say that the new low-cost shooting technologies had simplified the approach to video-making, but not always the results are exciting. I don’t know if I’m part of a scene, but I’ve got a lot of hopes in some young directors who are experimenting in cinema, raising works that are distant from the usual italian constraints about comedy and family drama.

WPD:  Are you actually working on something?

 
Fabio d’Orta: I’m working since several months on the pre-production phase of a very ambitious and spectacular short-movie project. Soon we’ll start shooting, followed by a very engaging post-prodution phase. The short, in our intention, would last between 15 and 20 minutes, and will be set in an alternate reality made of violence and beauty, in where everything can happen.