A norwegian guy’s shadow

I presume you know Lasse Gjertsen from Youtube. He is a very inventive filmmaker. His film entitled "Hyperactive" has great success.


The "US" is also a really charming film.

Every time I see Lasses’ films it occurs to me: If you want to make a movie, don’t forget the experimentation is much crucial in filmmaking. You have to release your playful expermenting self to create a really lively film.
Lasse speaks about how did he make his movie (the quotes from Youtube):

„Well, this was kind of an experiment. I wanted to see how it would look if my shadow ran away. I cut myself away from the scene so that only the shadow would remain. The result ist 100% but I think it's a cute little film.. (How it's made: Filmed 3 different things in each scene (the up the street scene in this example); the location (the street), me running (as me), and me running as the shadow. The sequences were exported from Premiere to seperate image files. In each image, or frame, I had to delete the surroundings so that only me (or only my shadow on that sequence) was visible. I then put the two sequences on top of the location sequence. Voila! I also did some simple photoshopping on some scenes, like when the shadow is dead on the ground. The smoke in the film is artificial. I filmed myself having a sigarette behind a black cloth, so that the smoke went through (filmed in front of the cloth of course). I could then put it in the film as gunsmoke and breathing, using luma key. Oh, the car isn't really there either. It was cut in from another clip. The blood is blackcurrant juice.”

The "Machine Man" is also made by stop-motion technique.


Lasse says:

„Well, this isn't a very funny movie, more experimental, artistic and, eerm well.. lame..?
Anyhooo, I think the way the guy's walking cycle is continuous while the background is changed out every frame looks cool. It took a while to edit it all together, and I think it's a nice little thingie.. (How it's made: Gaah, do I really have to explain? Ok. Filmed my friend Bo Fan at over 70 locations, (used Premiere to) cut it into different video files, figured out how many frames his walking cycle was and just started cutting together, frame by frame. Wee.. Another problem I encountered was that his body was in different places and sizes on the screen in each clip! So I put two pieces of blutac on the PC-screen, one for his head, and one for the bottom of his feet. Then I "just" had to move his body into the right position and size according to the blutac. The sounds are the real sounds from the different clips, and in addition to that I put on an in-fading "jet engine" kind of sound to make it more stressing. The music is made in FL Studio.”

Lasse’s work is a possible exemplary: if you want to make a movie, you can use quiet simple tools too and of course the most important to use your imagination.