VFX Pro
KromA helped to put Julia Roberts in the role of her dreams in providing visual effects services for the new Dave Matthews video Dream Girl. The studio worked with director Dave Meyers in concocting the video's surreal world where Roberts is pursued by a faceless stranger. The video marks the first screen appearance for Roberts, a long-time Dave Matthews fan, since giving birth to twins last year.
The video has Matthews in a movie theater watching Roberts on screen. In the screen story, Roberts approaches a man in a park but flees when she finds he has no face. Roberts' confusion mounts as her environment repeatedly transforms around her and she turns into a small girl and then back again. The story ends happily, however, when the shadowy stranger morphs into Matthews.
KromA's role was to replace Matthews' real with a featureless, mask-like covering. The transitional effects, where the environment morphs, were more complicated. In each case, the change of scene is sudden and extreme. The first instance occurs when Roberts is walking through a park and abruptly collides with a brick wall—as the camera pulls back, the park has been replaced by a seedy alley. As she leaves the alley, Roberts bumps into drummer Carter Beauford who transforms into the faceless man and when she pushes away from him, her surroundings again change, this time to a playground and she becomes the girl.
In KromA's subtle handling of the effects work, the transitions become increasingly sophisticated and complex. The switch from park to alley is almost a simple cut, but later when a laundromat setting transforms into church, a wave passes through the image and motivates the change. A moment later, when the scene shifts back to the laundromat, the whole environment appears to be in flux; washers and dryers bob up and down. All this climaxes with a sequence where the environment undergoes a succession of quick shifts from laundromat to playground to alley to park to a bedroom where Roberts lays asleep surrounded by strangely vibrating pillows.
KromA's Yukich accomplished the unique looks by separately manipulating individual elements and objects within the frame, like pieces of a puzzle. The pillows, thus, hover in the air as if their place in reality is not quite fixed.
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