Tomás Pagán Motta — “I Have Been Lost”
ON PRODUCING THE VIDEO FOR “I HAVE BEEN LOST”
Coming in at nearly 500 cuts, sequences of the new music video for “I Have Been Lost” appear to be stop-motion-animation. Nearly all of the effects in the video were created without computers, shot entirely in-camera using ZUZETTE, a new prototype robotic effects-camera which the auteur director Zambia had been developing in collaboration with a NASA engineer for a sequence in a feature film.
IN CONVERSATION
TOMÁS: I got lucky. We met on a train ride to New York and bonded over a mutual love of old acoustic instruments, how they bloom over time, developing their voice. We spoke about music, art, our different upbringings and at the last stop, parted ways.
The conversation spooked me and inspired the song. I excitedly sent Zambia a test pressing along with a handwritten letter. The response I received months later made zero mention of my record or the train ride, disappointing me a bit: they were at the Zambicorp super-shop filming a technical test for a robotic-camera, and they needed a guinea pig. I agreed, and it was then requested of me that I bring the most “personal key” from my life to the studio. I didn’t know if that meant corporeal property or some mental process I used to keep the blues away, so I brought a key to my grandmother’s house in Puerto Rico, where my family is from and where I spent time in my youth.
“I got lucky. We met on a train ride to New York and bonded over a mutual love of old acoustic instruments, how they bloom over time, developing their voice. We spoke about music, art, our different upbringings and at the last stop, parted ways.”
Upon arrival I was escorted down a brightly painted hallway, though a room full of gears and glass-blowing experiments and out into a studio where I was blinded by the flickering light of two projectors aimed in my direction. I looked back and it was some kind of re-edit of Ren & Stimpy and old Tex Avery cartoons on the same screen. I started to make out some music and followed my ears to the far corner of the studio, where I discovered the record I sent Zambia was playing. A theatrical spotlight shone upon an open suitcase style record player on the floor. The music was pouring into a small half-set made from cardboard and various styles of chiffon. There was a chunk of raw pyrite spinning on the record player, causing light to spin and pulse across the studio. Zambia and I reunited here in this set, and I was asked to take my grandmother’s key and punch small “key-holes” through the cardboard set until there were enough for “constellations.”
Zambia was inspecting a bizarre pile of gears, wires and twisted metal. It was beautiful and looked like it belonged in front of the Hirshhorn museum. There was a camera bolted onto it, which I learned was ZUZETTE, a prototype robotic camera device. I was directed to sit down and perform my song to the record. The robotic device circled around and swung past me in fast kinetic movements and loops. At one point ZUZETTE lost her sync and the gears started spinning the rig in circles as fast as helicopter blades. The safety shut-off kicked in (after only .44 seconds, I was told) and Zambia called the test shoot a wrap.
We sat there under the lights, with ZUZETTE purring away on the floor behind us and discussed the evening’s work. We had to stop because of that incident and on my late train ride home I chalked it up as a bust, that the glitches in the robot had rendered the test useless. Some weeks later, I received a clip in the mail. I was amazed to see an intense, time-bending series of images of me singing in sync to my song. A note was included with the clip. It said that Zambia wanted to continue making a piece for my song before resuming development on the film project.
It was then that I learned Zambia’s bricolage method for the piece was comprised of beautifully serendipitous mistakes, evolving into golden opportunities, something instinctually known. Nothing went to waste. They trusted the work, and created without hesitation. The result was confident and breathtaking footage reflecting something new in the music I hadn’t recognized before.
A lot of the material from our first shoot ended up in the final cut. To this day I’m still not quite sure if this had been the plan all along, or if we were both discovering my music video together at the same time.
“We took several big steps back with nearly all of our planned set-ups of Tomas in the star-set, revealing both the illusion and the artifice. […] with his music you can feel the air, and hear the atmosphere in the room.”
ZAMBIA: Tomás said something on the train which I’ll never forget: he leaned over, as if to confide in me, and said he felt like he was peering into the cosmos through an old lock. This image of a ‘tiny key-hole to the universe,’ would not leave my mind, and so it became the main visual and editorial theme.
Our new theme led to a celebration of surrealism. In the gathering scenes, we made some decisions in the cinematography, production design, wardrobe, and makeup which gave us room to “tip our hat” in the direction of Man Ray, Buñuel, Dali, and Magritte. We peppered the shoot with ‘fun’ visual references to some personal favorite landmarks of cinema / art history. One favorite example is our big “Powell and Pressburger” finish towards the end, inspired by the extended dance in The Red Shoes. I decided we’d reveal a bit more to our audience than is often seen in music videos: we took several big steps back with nearly all of our planned set-ups of Tomas in the star-set, revealing both the illusion and the artifice. This way of working allowed us to keep it loose and mirror Tomas’s studio methods: with his music you can feel the air, and hear the atmosphere in the room.
Despite the fact that we filmed with vintage (film) and bleeding-edge technology (Red Dragon 6K and ZUZETTE), the most exciting aspect of the entire production to me was our decision to break the wall and reveal how and where we created this. In the edit, I loved cutting from artificial stars, to a scene where the entire star-illusion is revealed, and instead of deflating the mood, it enhances, giving us a real sense of time and place with Tomás, reminding us of the inherent potential that is everywhere.
Throughout the production Tomás consistently showed me how beautiful things can be when they don’t go how you expect them to. I’m back at work on ZUZETTE now, fixing the glitches in our code, but on our shoot they weren’t perceived as errors, but beautiful imaging algorithms that we harnessed in a completely unique way.
For the gathering scenes, each take lasted between 25 and 40 minutes, with the camera undercranked to approximately one frame per second. We used different variations of the track slowed down to the point where it was impossible to know which words were being sung. Digital cue-cards were deployed to keep Tomás’s mouth matching the track, and we handed these out to several “translators” who we dressed in chiffon camouflage and posted at each corner of the set. Since we never knew where each lengthy improvised take would lead us around the set, we had to make sure someone would be there to give Tomás the next phoneme in his song.
During the extended takes, I was directing Tomás’s body language and wordage to stay synced with the track using my whole body based on a handwritten timeline I had taped to ZUZETTE’s screen. We chose some actors close to the lens to mimic my body movements so that the actors in the very background could stay in sync as well. Getting Tomas’s mouth, eyes, and body to match up to the track was an extremely challenging exercise in extended focus, but we pulled it off.
“I Have Been Lost” was shot on the following formats:
- 16mm film, Bolex H16, Switar 26mm f1.1 super-speed, vintage Angenieux super-speed Zoom
• 35mm film, full frame ‘hand cranked’ Contax Aria, Kodak Plus X Pan, digital scan
• 35mm film, full frame ‘burst mode’ Contax G2, Kodak Plus X Pan, digital scan
• Epic-X Monochrome 5K, Zeiss Superspeeds
• Epic Dragon 6K, Zeiss Superspeeds, Ultra Primes
16mm film services by Colorlab in MD
35mm film hand-processed at Zambicorp
Cut using Final Cut Pro 7.0.3
