Indestructible

Indestructible

Directors: Mat Cook and Julian Gibbs
Production Company: The Intro Corporation
Date: 8 February 1997

This is the third single to be taken from the girls' debut album "Alisha Rules The World".

The girls say:

"It's about a relationship between a male and female, or sisters, or mum - dad... about any kind of relationship, basically saying that sometimes you do get on my nerves, but basically when we're together we're a strong force and we should always remember that, you know that love we've got... "

The video features a full colour, 3D animated Alisha for the first (and last) time - she's seen in the opening sequence for the video.

The soft-toned love song tells the story of a relationship that endures despite flaws. The video shows Shellie and Karen in a world of giant, computer-generated toys.

They hurtle around in a wind-up car, collide with an enormous teddy bear and plummet from the steel girders of a severed railway bridge.

Far from defying the laws of physics, however, the two girls relied on sophisticated video effects to render themselves invulnerable.

"It was the record company that suggested using animated images generated by a computer," explains Director Cook.

"We wanted to create a dreamy, fantastical feel to the video, using a sort of Felix-the-Cat animation rather than a shiny, modern look."

Cook and Gibbs turned to the Thirties for inspiration. "We borrowed patterns and shapes from Thirties' textile design," Cook says, "as well as using icons such as Zeppelins and searchlights, while the girls themselves are reminiscent of glamorous Thirties' film stars." Even the virtual lighting is intended to mirror the expressionistic style of the Thirties. "We added projection flicker," says Cook, "and washed out the original colours so that the girls blended in better with the backgrounds."

And just as the laws of physics are different, but consistent, for cartoon characters, so the virtual world of Indestructible generated and complied with its own laws. "We created a whole world inside the computer," says Cook.

"The weird thing is that once you've created it you have to obey certain laws in the same way that you have to in the real world.

There's a degree of faking, but things such as movement and light and shadow follow rules."

How was this world constructed? By using a range of film and video technologies, including blue-screen imagery, motion control camera work and 3D animation (see left).

The first stage in the making of Indestructible was the shooting of so-called blue-screen footage. Just as the weatherman is shot in front of a plain, blue screen over which is superimposed a map of the British Isles, so the Poole sisters were subjected to two days' rigorous filming in an entirely blue environment.

"It was very hard for them," says co-director Julian Gibbs. "All they had was some basic models and props, but they had to act as though they were inhabiting this virtual world.

They mimed to the song, while we shouted directions." For example, the car pictured in the video was originally a blue box with a steering wheel in which Karen and Shelley sat while the directors yelled: "Quick, swerve to the left" or "Sharp right".

The blue environment was shot using a 35mm film camera mounted on a "motion-control rig" - a massive, computerised camera mount used for filming multiple takes of the same shot.

At the end of the motion-control shoot, the mathematical parameters of each shot were stored on disk and transferred to a computer that used the data to help create the virtual world of Indestructible.

This world had to match exactly the blue-screen rushes - hence the need for the data from the motion-control rig.

"Inside the animation computer," says Phil Hurrell, head of the computer animation department at the London post-production facility SVC, where Indestructible was put together, "there's a virtual camera that recreates the movements of the real 35mm film camera." Animators then set to work building 3D models of planes, trains and teddy bears. According to SVC's Moira Brophy, the post-production producer of Indestructible, this part of the process took up enough man hours to fill 50 days of work, although four animators working around the clock, managed to complete it in 14 days.

The computer-generated models and animated backgrounds were then substituted for the real-life blue models and backgrounds in the final edit of the 35mm footage.

The latter (which was converted into digital video via a tele-cine machine) was degraded to resemble more closely footage from the Thirties. The whole process took just over two weeks.