Reel Dealer
A Marionette Mashup
Words: Sandy Hunter
The musical fusion of disparate elements into remixed original works has been par for the course for over a decade, but the video for Tiga's cover of Nelly's "Hot in Herre" is hilariously novel, marrying marionettes with expertly reproduced hip hop visuals.
Of course, the Montreal musician has already had great success with covers; an electro reworking of Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" tore up the European dance charts. "Hot in Herre" fuses Nelly's sweaty entreaty with the visual acumen of EyeballNYC director Alex Moulton and Tiga's puppeteering sibling, Thomas "Lord of the Marionette" Sontag. Fans of Tiga's live performances (and those who caught Thomas Sontag's string-work at Miss Kittin and the Hacker gigs) are no doubt familiar with his brother's precise ability to imbue puppets with surprisingly human dance moves.
Starring a swaggering puppet sporting an under-eye strip a la Nelly,
the "Hot in Herre" clip riffs on Francis Lawrence's Justin Timberlake
videos as much as it does the high-bling content of videos for P Diddy
and of course, much of the Hype Williams back catalogue. Booty
shaking, flossed out females and multiple outfit changes (marionette
wardrobes were supplied by New York designer Hye-jin Hwang) and
above all flawless dance floor choreography by Thomas Sontag elevate
the clip beyond mere spoof.
"We wanted to make this video as much a hip hop video as we could with puppets, on a small budget," says Moulton of the pair's intentions. "Since it's a cover song, we decided to cover a number of videos. There are things we are making fun of, but reverently so. We were trying to capture what Tiga was going after with this song and he explained it well to me. In the '60s, people would make a hit song and three months later it would be covered by someone else who made an even bigger hit out of it. That's hard to do with hip hop because the artists talk about themselves so much, but this really works."
When Sontag and Moulton had the concept nailed down, Moulton
enlisted the aid of EyeballNYC to create the required high gloss CG
backgrounds for the puppets' performances, primarily using After Effects
and 3D Studio Max. Stock images of graffiti were employed to
complement the video's artificial tone, as was a great deal of rear
projection.
"Thomas and I are both huge Michel Gondry fans and I wanted to do something with rear projection," explains Moulton. "So we built a stage, with Thomas on a scaffold above a ground glass backdrop and projected all the CG elements behind the puppets. Since it was the puppets in the environment and not composited, I was able, as a cinematographer, to light for that environment."
Some scenes, such as the lead puppet and his dog rolling through town in a convertible, required green screening. Along with using Photoshop's filters to enhance the roundness of certain puppet booty shots, other post-production nuances add to the video's veneer.
"When we got into post production we recomposited the CG backgrounds onto the rear projections," says Moulton. "The colors were kind of washed out so we punched them up and gave them that bling bling style with a weird mix of compositing and rear projection."
The results are a gleeful yet slick take on the song Tiga so aptly calls "the finest song I'd ever heard in a Burger King."
http://www.lordofthemarionette.com/
