Wow.

[Kieran]

It’s probably a combination of several techniques. But it’s certainly based around a stills photography technique. You set the camera to have a long shutter speed (30s+) and then draw in the air with a torch, then detonate a flash before the shutter closes. This will expose the shape you drew with the torch’s light and the rest of the scene will be exposed normally for a fraction of a second by the flash. If you do this with multiple stills cameras, arranged in a circle around your subject, then you can create a dolly move in post (a la matrix – though Gondry’s brother Michel had in fact done the effect before then).

Because it’s a Gondry though, the technique is being used with several others. Obviously he cannot be using solely stills cameras because people move, yet he has the same slow shutter effect in motion too. I’d say that the start is done with stills cameras – as the people are frozen. The parts where people are probably shot on a film – my guess is the band’s on a turntable. The middle parts would use video/film cameras in a circle on slow shutter speeds (though you can’t really slow the shutter that much) and so the extreme motion blurs towards the end are – I guess – using a circle of stills cameras going off in relay.

All of this is guesses. Also, I’m fairly certain it’s not CG, as the Gondrys prefer using in-camera techniques to do things – and the light swirls at the start have flares on them, which suggests they were drawn live, rather than in post.

[Spockedit]

Thanks. Now that you’ve explained it I dont know why I didnt realize how it was done.

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