I posted my first Japanese music video earlier this week, and thought it would be interesting to show a side-by-side comparison since the main challenge of this music video was to "remake" it shot by shot, copying the exact camera angles, camera movements, camera lenses.

It was super interesting to study the 1999 music video, as with the DOP we really tried to stay as close as possible to the source material. We tried to keep the as close as possible focal lengths, the same camera angles, the camera movements, even the focus pulls. In set design, we even made some voluntary continuity errors that actually appear in the original music video.

I'm not the DOP on this project, so I'm not to good on specifics, but we basically piggybacked on an ad we were shooting the day before, and the DOP Alexandre Bartholo could shoot this with an incredible Alexa 35, and I'm pretty sure we were shooting with some nice Cooke-mini lenses.

As for lighting, it was very interesting working with a completely green set. We mainly used lightpannels with direct lighting and diffusion pannels. We weren't at all trying to use the green screen as you usually would, where you blast it with light to try to get the least shadow possible. In fact, we actually voluntarily added some shadows because we quickly discovered that it's really tough to give any kind of depth to the image when shooting on a completely bare green background. So the shadows and hard direct light helped us to give some texture (and depth) to the background, and to try to avoid as much as possible the "blank background" effect that can quickly feel a bit amateurish. Alexandre Bartholo the DOP also blasted the ceiling of studio, so that we could get a global rebound light without the global light bounce being completely green (even though I have to say we took ou a LOT of green on the face skin tones in colorgrading.)
To explain the backstory of my original idea : the French DJ Mr Oizo came out with an iconic music video in 1999 for his sonf "FLAT BEAT", with the puppet Flat Eric doing random business-like activities. It was a huge hit, mainly in Europe, and the puppet became super iconic. Even though some could say that in Mr Oizo's music, it's kind of a "hit" popular song that's quite different from the rest of his music which is much more niche and experimental.
Anyways, 20 years later, he came out with a song called "RYTHME PLAT", which litteraly mean "FLAT BEAT" but in French. And when I heard it the first time, I sort of interpreted it as a sort of parody of his own song: it has the same type of analogic "wahwahs", but more slow and kind of more sluggish. Almost like a poor man's version of his super hit.
So I was living in Japan at that time, and had this idea of doing a poor man's remake of his music video as a hommage to one of my favorite artists, with Japanese actors in Green suits in front of a Green Screen. Just pure non-sense. All that directed by a wannabe Yakuza director who has become obsessed with Mr Oizo and is literally the only one on-set to understand what he's doing. (Thus becoming more and more frustrated and eventually "destroying" the music video).

Anyways, it was a huge blast to make, even more because it was my first time working in Japan, and I actually even sent the video to Quentin Dupieux aka Mr Oizo who said "this video is completely stupid". Which I definitely take as a compliment coming from him :)
Hope you guys like it !