Movie of Your Life
Business Objective: Create a unique and dynamic debut for musician Spencer Day’s first music video, “Movie of Your Life.”
Situation: Spencer Day, an established jazz and contemporary musician referred to as the male Nora Jones, launched his second album Movie of Your Life without a music video to date. Inspired by the album’s title track, Mercury’s cinematographer Sean Mitchell was chosen to create a visual splash on the silver screen. Mitchell lead the project as a producer, cinematographer and VFX supervisor and brought in Mercury president Chris Lawing as director.
The Mercury Solution: Incorporating Day’s love for Hollywood cinema, Lawing and Mitchell set to work on the story of the “Movie of Your Life” music video, a connected series of classic film scenes with Day starring as the leading role. Featuring all-time favorites such as Citizen Kane, Singin’ in the Rain and War of the Worlds, they began with the challenge of how to avoid copyright issues. The solution was a daunting task - recreate famous movie scenes from scratch, through the reconstruction of movie sets, use of CGI, matte paintings and green screen shooting. Lawing directed the video from beginning to end- introducing concepts, selecting Hollywood films and storyboards, directing talent, and supervising the production crew (30 people) and VFX artists (over 25 people) to ensure the concept came to life as envisioned.
Timeline: Five months.
Results: “Movie of Your Life” was selected by Dolby Laboratories as a demonstration video for the global launch of the Dolby 7.1 system at the annual Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention. In addition, it was licensed to Buick for showcasing automobile surround sound systems, premiered in San Francisco’s Dolby Theatre, played in Circuit City/Best Buy stores across the country and premieres in St. Louis at the Tivoli Theatre.
Further Accolades: “Movie of Your Life” special effects were recognized with two Telly Awards, honoring the finest film and video productions. In addition, this project received multiple DV Awards, an international competition celebrating outstanding creative and technical achievements in the emerging world of digital video production. American Cinematographer, the leading publication for the best cinematographers in the world, featured a story on the making of “Movie of Your Life,” as did Kodak for their In Camera magazine.
Watch the video (requires Quicktime)
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