| AGGRESSIVE WORK SCORES LATIN GRAMMY |  |   | | | NEW YORK - Alex Topaller and Dan Shapiro, the directing duo known as Aggressive (www.whatisaggressive.com), recently won the Latin Grammy in the "Best Short Form Music Video" category for Me Enamora, Colombian star Juanes' hit track. The video was the first single off Juanes' "La Vida…Es Un Ratico" CD.
| | (1/6/2009) | | |  WATCH THE VIDEO
Me Enamora features an attractive girl, driving in her car. She comes upon a roadblock, and once redirected, encounters workers who deliver the artist's heartfelt message via hand-held digital signs.
The Aggressive team shot everything against green screen and created their own visuals, including rows of marching workers who line the dark, atmospheric highway. Juanes' performance footage was also tracked onto hundreds of moving blue cards to create the digital-screen effect.
"To create the rows of marchers, Alex and I composited layer upon layer of keyed-out HD footage in z-space," says Shapiro. "That was the easy part. Because the main visual device of the video was hundreds of hand-held video panels, it was crucial that Juanes' bright performance setup look like a real physical object held, flipped, and spun in the shaky hands of the marchers. To accomplish this, we shot the marchers holding and manipulating big blue cards with track marks, and then used After Effects Version 7 to corner-pin track Juanes' performance onto each and every card, sometimes dozens in a scene, for well over a hundred shots."
Topaller adds that as the cards were moved, they would fall in and out of shadows, causing keying problems. They found chroma-blue paint to be the best solution. For keying, the team used Keylight, which managed to preserve the realistic shadows on the cards.
Me Enamora was produced by LA's RefusedTV and was shot by Aggressive at Ben Kitay Stages in LA.
Aggressive also used 3DS Max Version 9 on the project. The video was edited by Jason Yantz at NYC's Guerilla FX.
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