Here we are with a very special day: not only we have a brand new interview, but the video of today is not properly a videoclip: today we have a short film. It’s a visual story created on the notes of the musician Stefano Gueresi. The video comes from the Sensitive Mind studio, placed in Mantua (northern Italy). We interviewed Pietro Grandi for you, director of this wonderful movie.

WPD: How did you know Wanna Play Daily? Which are the reasons that brought you to suggest your work particularly to us?

Pietro Grandi: I found Wanna Play Daily on Facebook: a friend of mine shared your page. From that moment I started following you!
I think that Wanna Play Daily is a good website for creative people because it’s important to know various ideas, techniques, artists that form a worldwide landscape of videoclips in contemporary music, from pop to alternative, to classical music. The videoclip is evolving more and more with new techniques in the new digital world almost to recall, in my opinion, the avant-garde of the 70s, to remember ‘happening’ with various worlds like art, music, cinema, installations, literature & poetry.

WPD: Let’s start from you: which is your role in Sensitive Mind studio?

Pietro Grandi: I’m a creative director & a visual art designer at Sensitive Mind studio. I study and re-design the public space with videoart and graphic animation, creating a sensory atmosphere in the open air, museums, exhibitions, installations, live concerts and other indoor spaces. I think that every day is a discovery and an incredible journey that should help us to think and to love our culture and our lives. Being hungry and thirsty for knowledge, be crazy and curious towards everything that you come across in the world, always going forward in the things that you really believe in and want to do, learning day by day. Life is an incredible creature, I think.

WPD: And now about the video: tell us how the idea of a project so personal and out of the commercial logic was born.

Pietro Grandi: I created, around the music Le Segrete Passioni of the italian composer Stefano Gueresi, a fantastic story, created by listening to the music and to some feelings with the composer. I wanted to immerse the viewer in the real and unreal world at the same time, with a man who symbolizes a problem with an animal-symbol such as a Bluerabbit. This man, now Bluerabbit, wakes up in a deep emotional crisis, having lost the love and the strength to be a man. Chasing the past, so hoping to find that smile, that part of himself, lost among the concerns of memory. The torment clashes with a magical letter. The encounter between the lovers, a dream for the Bluerabbit, nothing escapes to the moon. Between dream and reality, Bluerabbit falls victim to his own reflection. In a dream can you dream of?

WPD: While watching to your video it is impossible to do not notice how the drawings are perfectly merged with the video recording. Which is the name of this technique, how did it works?

Pietro Grandi: It’s called rotoscoping animation. It was created by Max Fleischer, used for the first time in the series Out of Inkwell in 1914, used to create a cartoon imitating characters from real movies, frame by frame. This technique made famous recently by director Richard Linklater in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, it allows me to dream and to create something new in post-production with a surreal and fantastic spirit invoking one of my idols of the mixed techniques: Michel Gondry. The choice of mixed technique coincides with my desire to express the hybrid and surreal nature of the Bluerabbit. The cartoon component highlights the sensitive part of the Bluerabbit, while the real context creates with the real shooting the emotional torment. The bluerabbit symbolizes contemplation, spirituality and dynamic at the same time. I chose blue as the ideal color for its cold emotional condition, expressing the eternal motion of the spirit. The reality of color is influenced by internal events in the story. The blue gives way to warm at the achievement by the Bluerabbit, an emotional state finally calm, aware and eager towards his love, his secret passion. The story ends with the return to the simple reflection of the character, the same happens to the color: like a circle.

WPD: Reading to the end titles we noticed that you are animator and director, responsible for this technique. Are you particularly attached to the rotoscoping or was it only a design choice? Which are the elements that brought you to adopting it?

Pietro Grandi: It’s my favorite technique, but the technology today helps us fortunately. In fact, compared to the ’900, now you do the same with a graphics tablet and a program such as Adobe Flash, but still frame by frame. In order to facilitate the tracing of the character we put on the actor a rabbit mask. I really like the simplicity and simple line in movement that remind me the first experiments of pre-cinema. With the tracing of the real shooting like a sketch, I can rewrite the expressions and everything makes me want to get out my creativity and my passion for drawing. I’ve used this technique in two other video, for video contest by Coldplay in the song ‘Lost’ and for the tour ‘Stadi 2010′ and ‘Campovolo 2011′ in the song ‘Atto di Fede’ for the italian singer Ligabue.

WPD: How long did the filming process lasts and which was the composition of your technical equipment in the recording phase? Tell us something about the locations: where did you recorded the video and how important are the locations for the meaning of the final video?

Pietro Grandi: We shot the video in three different locations in one day. Together with the companion of adventures, Riccardo Guernieri, dop and video operator, editor of several italian videoclips, we shot with Canon 7D Camera in slow motion as before choosing the Sensitive Mind studio for chroma key, where actors kiss and where the Bluerabbit flies. While the sequence of the house in an apartment in Mantua, for the outdoor scene we went to Monte Baldo near Malcesine (Verona). I wanted a melancholy location, which could be seen from the silence of a lake and the mountains at the same time and this was the best around here.

WPD: How long did it take to edit the whole video and which softwares did you use in this phase?

Pietro Grandi: The process is very long for the post-production. For this video, I used one day to edit the video on Apple Final Cut and one month to rotoscoping on Adobe Flash and I recomposited this process in every scene on Adobe After Effects and I finalized with Apple Final Cut the entire video.

WPD: Inside the video we noticed a particular lettering, that in the end credits gets a dynamic aspect similar to an intermittent neon light. Tell us how did you realized it and why did you opt for this way rather than the classic end titles with the scroll up.

Pietro Grandi: The handwriting lettering is something that belongs much to my sign and also belongs to the graphic that I created for the album cover I Racconti del Lago by the composer Gueresi. I love the movement of lines as the glowing around the written words that remind me works done at the beginning of my career with the lighting artist Marco Nereo Rotelli. I feel that handwriting is very intimate, introspective and personal, but also bright and shiny as the soul that always want to light up and represent my work.