A look at Alien Workshop’s analog video effects for Mind Field

“Visual Workshop” documents the in-camera effects and experiments that Mike Hill and Chad Bowers (now the man behind Quasi) used for titles and atmosphere in the Workshop’s last full-length video.

Gif via Speedway Mag

Yesterday’s Jon Miner X Mogwai post reminded me of this great video by Alien Workshop. It’s montage of pretty much everything they tried for Mind Field and then some. The best part is that not only do you get this catalog of the outcomes but they pull back so you can see the sets and process. The metal-and-oil titles graphics were already cool but when you see that it’s entirely done by hand in camera? Inspiring.

Here’s some of what Mind Field filmer/director Greg Hunt had to say about this stuff in Speedway:

“It’s probably the easiest creative collaboration I’ve ever had in my life. One reason Mind Field feels the way the it does, and I can still watch and enjoy it, is because it was so natural. It wasn’t contrived, there weren’t meetings or any bullshit like that. I was doing my best to do what I was making and they were doing the best for what they were making and we just put it together and it became whatever it became. Creatively that’s a special dynamic to have, it’s rare. We didn’t shape it or overthink it we just let it be what it was going to be.

“There wasn’t a ton of back and forth, there wasn’t a ton of critiques. We would watch it and they would see where things are needed. There’s a lot of things in there, those little animations and characters they built which appear for two or three seconds – they just made and I dropped it in and it would be perfect.

“We really wanted everything to be shot as a physical element and not have titles that were completely created as graphics on a computer,” says Greg. Tangible design is fundamental to the Workshop, integral since the day Mike Hill conceived the company’s logo by scripting the word ‘Alien’ within the shadow cast by a desk lamp and cut it out with amberlith film. A process echoed twenty years later by what Greg says was one of the most complicated motifs he assisted with – the titles for each rider.

“I was more involved in that because it was everyone’s introduction and was going to be on the cover. They [Hill and Bowers] had gotten into this magnetic oil which, since then, I’ve seen a lot of people do outside of skateboarding. When you put a magnet under it, it spikes up and moves around. From there they cut steel letters they could make the title of the film and the riders’ names from. They kept fucking with it until they found something which felt special and they were really into.”

Here’s a little bonus — portraits shot on 16mm film by Greg Hunt. The layering was also done in-camera, meaning that Hunt shot film of one element and then rewound that film to shoot the other layers. Precarious and expensive work.

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