Looking to another shoot date on the Concert to End Slavery project that has included filming Moby, Cold War Kids, Rocco Deluca, Nickel Creek, Five for Fighting, and Switchfoot who I just finished a video for.

2. What have you found is the best tool or innovation that has come out in the last year?

I think YouTube is the best and worst thing to happen in the past year. More people seeing work and it looks horrible.

3. The project (film, television, commercial or music video) that most impressed you in the last year? Why?

The "I Hate Drake" clip Bill Barminski directed from the Mortified readings is fantastic on all levels.

4. The best or favorite project that you worked on in the past year? And why?

The Switchfoot "Awakening" video was good times. great band. great actors. concept that killed me.

5. Name the top 4 artists on your iPod?
Sufjan Stevens
Cold War Kids
Death Cab for Cutie
The Parson Redheads

BOOM's brandon dickerson recently completed an innovative and playful music video for alt-pop band Switchfoot. The video stars Tony Hale (Stranger Than Fiction, Arrested Development), Adam Campbell (Epic Movie) and Jayma Mays (Heroes, Ugly Betty) in a surreal cardboard cut-out battle to find out who reigns supreme in the realm of music-based gaming.

"I presented the idea of printing every frame of performance and re-photographing it frame-by-frame a year ago. It was great to have the band came back with a new song and idea in mind for the original concept," comments dickerson. "I had created tests with my friend Tony Hale and was looking for a project to work with him as well as Adam and Jayma who we ultimately assembled for this 2d-meets-3d world."

To accomplish this comedy-laden face off, dickerson employed the use of live action combined with a fully animated television composed of hand-torn photographic images (or the dickerson-coined "photomation"). This innovative technique involved printing 1,224 frames of live action footage (with 5 printers over 22 hours). The images were then hand torn (by 10 people over the course of 16 hours) for a purposely organic, hand crafted look, organized by time code into 1,224 envelopes and then and photographed in a cardboard box "performance space" at 24 FPS one frame at a time (stop motion animation). The process of photographing the ripped stills alone took 38 hours. To add practical, in camera effects, such as light flashes and foam lightning bolts in sync to the track, dickerson created a QuickTime map of the music so that these elements would hit on the beat of the music. The result is a video that "has the playfulness and imagination of a project devised by sophmore friends ditching school and messing around with someone's dad's camera equipment in a garage," says dickerson – a high concept, low-fi combination that stands out from the mainstream.

"We had a lot of fun making this video," says Switchfoot "We worked with our talented and good friend brandon dickerson, who made two of our earlier videos. The traditional concept of a music video can be a bit surreal, – lip-synching to your own songs can feel especially comical at times! With this irony in mind we wanted to make a video that doesn't take itself too seriously, even if the song itself is dealing with weighty issues."

dickerson agrees: "We had a blast shooting the band in Toronto (on tour) and the actors in Los Angeles. When you work with talented actors-half your job is to give them the freedom to do what they do best. When you work with 3 inch paper cut-outs performing one frame at a time… your job becomes incredibly meticulous. I used to have a picture of Walt Disney that I burned after the shoot. I have a newfound respect for Tim Burton and Nick Park. The photomation process beat me into the ground, but I'm beyond thrilled with the results and have an idea to use the process in a short film."

To date, the video has received over half a million hits on YouTube and is also being shown on FuseTV.

www.boommv.com

CREDITS
Title: Awakening
Artist: Switchfoot
Label: Sony/BMG

Production Company: BOOM
Director: brandon dickerson
EP: lauren schwartz
Producer: Erik Press
Art Director: Debbi Andrews

Editorial Company: Plaster City Post
Editor: Ian Vertovec