Good Morning Behind the Scenes

January 20, 2017

The latest film by Director Michael Marantz, ‘Good Morning’ is an abstract visual poem created as a rallying call for those feeling disillusioned in the current political environment to ‘wake up’. Michael partnered with musical artist, KAMAU, who wrote and performed the poem.

To complement the poem, there were several visual styles to convey the emotional storytelling. A major part of the unique visual style of ‘Good Morning’ is the freefalling and floating sequences.

To accomplish this look, we went out with a drone to capture our plate images, then paired them with our performers on a custom build greenscreen rig. The floating sequences were accomplished with another greenscreen rig that was vertical. We were careful to shoot the plates first so that we could match the natural lighting in the plate image with our greenscreen shoot. There were many moments on set that both Michael and Tim were doing live composites to make sure the match was right. The final look is dreamlike yet grounded in reality.

For the other part of the shoot, we shot practically in Wall Street, New York City. To make this part of the film also feel dreamlike yet grounded in reality, we shot most of our action in reverse. The kids in the film were actually walking backward for all of these scenes and had to practice doing so.

We have to thank the incredible work of all of our cast and crew that made this overly-ambitious shoot happen.