Directing duo DOM&NIC reunite with The Chemical Brothers for the tenth time, pushing the boundaries again with virtual production and real time VFX. They have been doing this sort of thing since 1995.

DOM&NIC have been directing music videos for The Chemical Brothers since the mid-Nineties and have now reached a landmark, with Live Again: it's their tenth video for the ageless pioneers of electronic dance music. And following a running theme of previous works, the directing duo are once again pushing the boundaries of state-of-the art technology, this time in the frontier of virtual production and real time VFX.

The video for Live Again is superb visual entertainment of the kind that DOM&NIC have been creating for Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons of The Chemical Brothers ever since they started with Setting Sun over 25 years ago. It's a trippy Groundhog-Day-esque adventure story through multiple environments in a continuous dance performance by the captivating and seemingly elastic dancer, Josipa Kukor. 

In her crowded trailer Kukor wakes from a nap at the table and emerges into the setting that surrounds it - a desert - stretching and moving and returning to nap at the table of the trailer - and wakes again, emerging to a different environment, a forest. And so this goes on. Once the structure has been established, it becomes a realm of endless possibilities, in terms of both Kukor's performance and the backgrounds. 

She wakes or is reborn in a different environments ranging from deserts to nighttime neon city streets and cave raves to Martian worlds.

It was achieved by shooting on a virtual stage, hosted and powered by ARRI Stage London, the creative and technical expertise of Untold Studios, together with virtual production specialists from ARRI Solutions, Creative Technology and Lux Machina. It was a new experience of filming for various members of DOM&NIC's highly experienced crew, including longtime collaborator, production designer Chris Oddy, and DoP Stephen Keith-Roach.

But as the directors say here, the journey of making it pushed the technology beyond its known limits, breaking new ground, and adding weight to the proposition of embracing virtual production as a creative choice first and foremost.

"Working with The Chemical Brothers is a dream for any music video director and we’re really lucky to be still making films together after quite a few (ahem) years," say DOM&NIC. "The Chems just keep smashing it with great tracks that demand videos that live up to the music and hopefully add something extra to the whole experience.

"Live Again is our tenth collaboration and the track’s title inspired the idea of an another dance piece with a twist. The woozy, wonky analog sounds and the dreamlike lyric suggested a hallucinogenic visual journey following a character caught in a loop of death and rebirth. The hero woman in the film wakes or is reborn in a different environments ranging from deserts to nighttime neon city streets and cave raves to Martian worlds.

"The idea inspired us to use the new Arri XR virtual production stage and its cutting edge technology in a way that had never previously been done. This is an idea that could not really have been achieved with traditional filmmaking techniques. We created virtual CGI worlds and used long unbroken camera takes, without edits, moving between those different worlds seamlessly with our hero character.

"Tom and Ed encouraged us to really capture the feel of the track in the cinematic texture and look of the film. We were given the challenge to give it the visual equivalent of putting a clean sound through a broken guitar pedal to transform and degrade it into something unique. We love the way the film has an analog and messed-up film look to it, it really adds to the visual trippy experience.

"We were showered with the generosity of such a strong and huge team of immensely talented companies and individuals that helped us to make this film happen because they love working with The Chemical Brothers. Many of them also worked with us on past Chemical Brother’s videos it’s become a creative family!  Without their time, talents and generosity a film like this could never make it out of heads and onto a screen."

We created virtual CGI worlds and used long unbroken camera takes, without edits, moving between those worlds.

Untold Studios Real-time Supervisor Simon Legrand confirms that the project pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in virtual production, breaking ground as they went.  

"This project was a perfect storm, with our team at Untold working with Outsider and the ARRI Stage London team to pull out all of the stops to bring DOM&NIC's bold and innovative concept to life," says Legrand. "After designing seven bespoke virtual worlds in pre-production, we were then able to tweak elements on set, on the fly, giving the directors the freedom to play and experiment.  This is the first time that virtual environments have been switched live on set in this way and we're really proud to have been trusted to help make it a reality."

Live Again features vocals from Halo Maud (Heavenly Recordings) and follows on the heels of the recently released single No Reason and is taken from the tenth Chemical Brothers album that’s due later this year.

“Working with the production on this project represented many creative and technical challenges," says David Levy, Business Development Director at ARRI Solutions. "It was a unique opportunity for all of us involved to really see how hard we could push the boundaries.

"Technically, this required a huge collaborative effort between camera, lighting, VFX and virtual production supervision to ensure seamless integration. This promo brought the best of the best together across all these disciplines to bring the creative team’s vision to life and deliver an incredibly special end result.”