As the arena lights dim to open the concert, an eerie
underscore begins and the video screens flicker to life. On screen, Madonna
strolls through a dimly lit horse stable before turning to the camera with the
spoken-word opening of her new song.
According to Steele co-founder and supervising visual
effects artist Jerry Steele, there are six streams of video that play back at
once on giant screens, some of which physically move together to form a single
picture. "You literally can't be off by one pixel or frame," he notes.
One of the most striking FX sequences involves a pair of
scenes in which horses rise from the Earth at the beginning of the video and
descend into the ground at its conclusion. Monique Eissing served as lead
visual effects artist on the job and says one horse was filmed in multiple
plates, each with very specific framing requirements. She created and
composited new, single pieces of land and sky so the horses could be lined up
as desired. Because there was dust blowing in the air as a design element, more
dust had to be composited to connecting points among the plates.
Fashion photographer/director Steven Klein directed the Future
Lovers video (via DNA). Offline was handled
by Clark Eddy using Apple Final Cut Pro. Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3
provided color grading for the video.
Steele conformed more than 50 percent of the program in Final
Cut Pro and completed the rest of the conform and effects shots using Quantel
eQ and Henry.