First sunday of November, first interview of the month.
Today we have for you the director of Call me in the afternoon‘s video, by the Canadian band Half Moon Run. Człowiek Kamera directed a dream-like video in the woods, a forest of wonder and mysterious presences, populated by animals and by the beautiful Justyna Markowiak.
 
WPD: Człowiek Kamera, could you tell us about the genesis of the concept for “Call Me in the Afternoon”. Did you propose the idea to the band or did you talked together in order to build the imagery?
 
Człowiek Kamera: The concept was ready for about a year. Originally I was planning to realize it with one of the Polish singers but it didn’t work out for reasons beyond our control. I moved on to work on other projects, until after a few months I heard Half Moon Run’s first single. I couldn’t get it out of my mind for a long time. I listened to the whole album and then presented my concept to the band. The entire clip has been made according to my ideas, though with the help of objective feedback from the band.

 
WPD: The first director’s choice I noticed was the cinematography: the use of cold colors such as green and light blue that gives at the video a dreamy mood. Can you tell us if this was the aim of the choice? What camera equipment did you use?
 
Człowiek Kamera: Right after the premiere of the clip, some of my colleagues from the trade were sceptical about it’s colour scheme. This time I wanted to get the colours as neutral as they could be… without unnecessary contrasting. The tonal range is flat but natural in its flatness. The camera had to be held still on a tripod with few changes in the picture planes, which I guess made the whole thing look a bit theatrically or resemble the films from the beginnings of cinematography. I wanted to film everything in a wide perspective because the top priority was to show dynamism inside the picture.

 
WPD: I noticed some similarity with Magritte’s surrealist works, was this intentional? Did him inspired you?
 
Człowiek Kamera:The concept was based on my own photo. I know Magritte’s art but I can’t remember when I discovered it. Frankly, it was after the premiere of the clip that several people sent me messages suggesting similarity to the works of that great painter.

 
WPD: Speaking about art, another piece of contemporary art flashed in my mind when I saw the hands coming out of the trees is Giuseppe Penone’s “Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto”. Did you know it? What do you think of it?
 
Człowiek Kamera: I haven’t had a deeper look at Giuseppe’s works yet, but the metallic hand can symbolize a real axe cutting the tree, and as a consequence taking its life. Axe as same as the hand is a kind of a tool for changing the reality. It’s up to us to choose how to use these tools. That choice is what makes us different from the other people. Everyone involved in art has different priorities and different ways of expressing themselves through art. Metal can be reshaped over and over but trees grow in their own way… they breathe.

 
WPD:  How long did the shooting process last?And how long for the postproduction phase?
 
Człowiek Kamera: The whole clip was filmed during 2 months of the summer holiday. It wasn’t created in a rush. I wanted it to be realized in harmony with nature, without the pressure of the deadline looming over me. When my actress and I both had time, we would just grab the necessary accessories and go to the nearby woods. The filming took about 2 weeks in total, up to 5 hours of filming on each day. After returning home I would stick together what we had managed to accomplish. The post production phase was about 11 days. It took so long due to various technical limitations resulting from the edition technique used.

 
WPD:  You worked with owls, worms, mice, dogs and horses, do these animals symbolize something? Was it hard to work with them?
 
Człowiek Kamera: Animals in this and another of my video clips add a certain level of naturalism and randomness to it. We all know that one cannot be completely tamed. I have been surrounded with animals since childhood. At home we have had aquarium fish, hamsters, parrots, cats, dogs, guinea pigs, and my father is a breeder of homing pigeons (which you can see in one of the sequences by the way). The sequences featuring the horse, the owl and the hawk were filmed with the assistance of professional trainers.

 
WPD:  The “magic” we can see in this video is that parts of the girl’s body appear or disappear behind trees, were there difficulties in filming? Has this technique got a word that defines it? What should a director do or don’t in order to get the perfect result?
 
Człowiek Kamera: As a matter of fact, the whole clip was difficult to realize. I was creating it basing on the experience from my photographic work, however I would encounter many problems. The most important was to keep the tripod stable and still which was optimal for the success of the post production. The hands were filmed one by one so if I had filmed the first three of them under a cloudy sky, then I couldn’t film the rest during a sunny weather. The separate shots were divided using masks. I doubt this technique has any particular name of its own.
About 3 days before finishing the clip, when editing, I fell into a weird state of lunacy. I didn’t know if I am that clip or if I am that song and if all that isn’t a kitch or a dream. It was a hard time. But there’s no art without suffering. I was doing the postproduction until an hour before the official release. In my opinion we will never be able to equal the nature in terms of perfection. Nevertheless, we should keep grinding our diamonds until the very end.