We first came across Henk Loorbach (aka Supereletric) when his jubilant, colourful animations scorched themselves our retinas. Now he’s teamed up with fellow director André Maat for a smart and inventive one-shot-spot for Red Cross Germany. The spot sees footage of a lifetime projected onto a woman’s face to demonstrate the importance of blood donation – and the story behind the production is pretty fascinating too. We caught up with Henk and André to find out more.

One of the most challenging thing to me personally was the balance between story and interaction of the images with the face. One moment the face became merely a canvas for projection, with a easy to follow story, the next moment we went way overboard and had this crazy LSD trip of projection mapping happening, which was impossible to understand as a story. And then to fit all this information into 21 seconds was quite hard sometimes.

No, it’s not the final scene of 7even…

How did you put together the projected footage? Where did you get that from – did you go out and shoot it yourselves?
The projected footage is a combination of still images, stockfootage and animations made by us. Most stills and stockfootage were sponsored by Getty images, which was great, because we got access to a huge amount of stuff.
We’ve gone through many possible cycles of life and possible milestones in a human’s lifespan several times, and ended at this point, which we feel is a well balanced mix between narrative storytelling and just enough quirkiness.

We had a silicon mold made from the woman’s head, (yes, it was delivered in the mail, a great moment) and did all kinds of projection tests on that.
this helped a lot in defining which scenes would work and what would be just too weird to get away with.

We shot the whole thing almost in one take. Well there were many takes involved, with variable openings and endings, and we tried a lot of angles,
but this linear face to face one take we just felt got the message across best.

Shooting the spot in one take

The music was something different as well – it had to be somewhat human, yet we did not want it to be a song that would be “the soundtrack of her life”, so there went a lot of trying and retrying into getting this collage of happenings without being too fragmented.

What have you been up to since we last spoke to you on the Young Director blog?
Since the last time we spoke, i’ve been busy as usual, doing music videos,animations and some commercial projects together with Andre, as well as just messing around with little things, like paper and plastic, some block printing and the occasional coconut synthesizer.

On the more serious side, I’m trying to focus a bit more on live action and
especially the combination between live action and animation,
as well as finding more international clients and representation.

credits:

Team HEIMAT, Berlin
CD Art: Tim Schneider
CD Text: Andreas Manthey
Art/ Graphic: Iris Thiede Conrad
Text: Farid Baslam
Account Supervision: Frank Ricken
Account Manager: Janina Vogel, Melanie Bartels

Production: Markenfilm Berlin GmbH // Lutz Müller
Directors: André Maat, Henk Loorbach
DoP: Nikolai von Graevenitz
Postproduction Music: Mothersmilk, Berlin & Lutz Müller
Videos/Photos: Getty Images