Clear Use Flame For Jack Peñate Promo

Jack Peñate's rise in the UK music scene continues with his latest release 'Torn on the Platform'.
The accompanying video, directed by Crossroads' Tim Pope, is refreshingly innovative and is based on paper puppetry. Clear's Marcus Wood used Flame to help pull-off the idea of traditional animation with a modern twist.
The video opens as Jack Peñate designs a paper theatre and puppet. As the puppet comes to life, we see that Jack's head has been superimposed. The rest of the track is played out on a paper guitar on his paper stage. In between background changes and dance routines, we see glimpses of the real-life Jack pulling strings behind the scenes.
Having a famous illustrator for a grandfather (Mervyn Peake, the celebrated artist behind Gormenghast), Jack wanted to base the video around a theatre. Tim Pope developed this idea further by coming up with the idea of a performing puppet with a live-action head. Jack drew all the puppets himself and Tim re-worked them to get simple childlike look. Tim then discussed the idea with Clear's Marcus Wood who, despite having no time for research and development, assured Tim that he would manage to fully realize the idea within the short timeframe.
Two sets were used during the shoot - one for close-ups, one for wide shots and Jack had to keep his head as still as possible whilst singing his song. After the shoot (which only took several hours), Tim came to Clear to further develop his required look and feel with Marcus. Once the pair had established a 'traditional but technical' visual style, Marcus was left to his own devices whilst Tim approved work-in-progress from his Brighton home via FTP. Marcus' solution was to frame-cut every five frames in order to create an almost stop-frame animation feel. Then it was a case of tracking the puppet's head (which was marked with a cross during the shoot) so that bluescreen footage of Jack's head could be composited.
Clear's VFX artist, Marcus Woods, said: "With a job as unique as this, it's helpful to have a bit of R&D time but the schedule was almost as tight as the budget! Thankfully, Tim and I are used to working together so we instinctively knew it would all come good in the end - which was a relief because, although the idea is simple, all that tracking make it a time-consuming project."
Crossroads director, Tim Pope, said: "What I like about Clear is that they never say 'no'. We discussed ideas and the first test was bang-on. I know Marcus well, he's completely fastidious, which is great because it means I can just let him get on with it without having to sit on his shoulders. Trusting him in this way gave me the freedom to shoot quite loosely and then hand over to him to do all the hard work."
Clear is a hi-end, full service post production house known for perfecting commercials, broadcast idents, films and music videos with progressive visual effects.
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