Catching Up with Director Elia Petridis

Posted on December 11, 2016 at 10:23 pm

I loved talking to the immensely creative Elia Petridis at Comic-Con last summer, and so was glad to have a chance to catch up with him to talk about the haunting Jesca Hoop music video he directed, a small gem.

The last time I saw you we talked about a lot of very cutting edge things like virtual reality and today we’re going to start by talking about something that’s a little more conventional, “The Lost Sky.” The first thing I want to ask you is about casting because the faces of the people in it were so interesting.

Film is such a visual medium that I’ve always cast faces. I cast for character, not for physique, I guess. But all the greats do it too, you know. I’m not in it alone.

How did this project come about?

Jesca and I are old friends. This is our fourth video together. And this is very intimate story. A few years ago, I was in a car accident. I was in the hospital and my partner left me while I was recovering. Jesca wrote this song at that time because we were friends. Many years later she came to me and she said “Look, I wrote this song, I’m looking at directors to do it and would you mind talking to one of the directors?” She told me it was inspired by my experience and other things but the seed of it was sort of what I was going through. She was like, “Elia, you have done three videos for me and this is a very personal story for you. Do you think you’d want to do it?” She said, “What’s very important to me is the theme of abandonment, what it’s like to be abandoned when you can’t really fend for yourself, you’re metaphorically left for dead, what’s that like?”

I sat down with Jesca and said, “Why don’t we do what I do and what I love to do is tell stories. I’d love to have it be a page turner, like a what is going to happen next kind of a situation. We’ve got the beating heart of the piece but what’s its skin, what genre? What does it do?” I said, “Do you want to do something Hitchcock? Do you want to do something like a little ‘Vertigo’ where he is stuck in this loop and he keeps waking up and you’ve got surprise and suspense where the first time that he is surprised but the second time that he is all suspense and the third times like a synthesis of that and you wake up and you find out that there is a real twist?”

And the more I went down that way the more I started thinking about things that I’ve always loved like the unreliable narrator. Jesca is an amazing artist and each of her songs is such a distinct character unto itself that I felt like I’d like to give this song its little place in the world. So, I started playing with the unreliable narrator and the loops and Hitchcock and shooting it like that because it’s all a metaphor for a marriage falling apart. Who’s really to blame? Is it the woman who was poisoning him? Or is it the man who has something to hide? And does he really have something to hide? Or is it all in her head? And then the two women together at the end. It’s kind of like wanting to sugarcoat the pill of all those big ideas by just really doing something suspenseful in these loops. Because the song also audibly is a loop that gets more intense as it goes along. The second verse is a bit more instrumented and layered and the third verse is much more lush so the song itself is a loop. I thought of Hitchcock’s mastery of “What happens next?” He was so good differentiating between surprise and suspense and how they are two different things.

There were moments of real emotion as we made it. When Jesca is crying in that out of focus shot, she’s really crying and there’s something about her crying — I was crying, the DP started crying, the whole crew started crying. There was something old and warm between us that she had taken it into her art form and then had handed it back. And then I had given it back in my art form, two friends that were sort of confiding in each other through their art, and supporting each other through their art.

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Interview: Director Elia Petridis of Filmatics 360 VR Creative Services

Posted on August 21, 2016 at 3:27 pm

Elia Petridis, CEO and Founder of the Filmatics 360 VR Creative Services, is at the forefront of technological and narrative innovation in storytelling, and I had a lot of fun talking to him about it at Comic-Con. “We pitch pure creative for virtual reality and/or 360,” he told me, which means that they introduce filmmakers to new, immersive technologies, “anything where you can interact with the space.” Just like you can look around your room, you can look around the “room” or “landscape” of the film or game. This applies not just to the visuals but the audio. “The audio in your ear is positioned so when you move away from it, it moves away from you.” He says the technology could support any kind of storytelling. “They’re going to cover news, they’re going to do animation, they’re going to do education, training. In terms of narrative you have to think about it in a modernist way and so it’s like what really deserves to be immersive. Our piece is a seance in and virtual-reality you’d be at the table.”

He made a film called “The Man Who Shook the Hands of Vincente Fernandez,” which he describes as “A Western that takes place in a nursing home.” The cast included Oscar-winner Ernest Borgnine in his last role, along with Barry Corbin and June Squibb.

That film was shot in a traditional manner, with a 35mm film camera. “And then here I am directing content for an immersive space which is basically four GoPros, 4K whatever. So it’s just about the impulse to tell stories and the impulse to service the medium.” It isn’t only the equipment that is different in a 360 movie. Petridis said that he looks for actors with theatrical experience “because we are shooting masters, stagnant masters for the most part. So if they drop a line we go back at square to one. I can’t jump in, I’ll get in the way, so I can’t do that. They have to nail the scene so we rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. And then get your lines, get the beats and the motivation, get the performance right and then we’ll choreograph into space, then we’ll set the camera up and we’ll shoot two or three takes and that’s it. How to directly determine a narrative in an immersive space is a different story. I would choreograph the eye like I would choreograph the dancer. So I would have something take place here and have an actor carry the activity into the next quadrant like a baton, and then have someone hand me the baton here and then have someone call me from here and then turn to him. It’s more like dance choreography mixed in with their storytelling.”

The use of this technology will extend into every area of communication and education. Petridis is now working on children’s content for hospitals, to help them cooperate with blood tests, “to distract children through neuroscience and content to make nurses lives easier and children’s lives easier, to disengage anxiety from the blood tests, especially for kids who are chronically ill. So things like helping them with sitting still or extending hands. For the VR to progress one must sit still. The nurses’ lives become super easy because the kid is sitting still and then all of a sudden 30 seconds in, in order for it to draw they give out their hands and the Band-Aid that they get is branded like the Band-Aid they see in VR so when they come out they can still look at the Band-Aid, they’ve got their badge of honor. We check in with the user experience. We want to make sure that it’s the best content for that, it’s not just like let’s put them on a CGI roller coaster. The sky is the limit if you do it right.”

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