The Aesthetics and Craft of Filming Baseworks: 4 Days Amidst a Pandemic

At the start of the Covid pandemic in Japan, during distancing and lockdown measures, we decided to prioritize the planning, filming, and production of the Baseworks Practice Platform. We collaborated with Tokyo-based film director Nicci Keller, known for his work with well-known brands, magazines, and artists like Ayumi Hamasaki and LUNA SEA.

The filming location

We did our filming at 10BAN Studio in Setagaya, Tokyo, a venue known for major TV, commercial, and film production. We used the Y-1 studio, which is 12 meters by 20 meters and 6 meters high, and has a three-sided infinity wall. Due to the pandemic, many scheduled productions were canceled. However, the studio director, who had worked with Nicci for many years and liked the Baseworks vision, helped us out by providing the Y-1 studio and technicians for four days within our modest budget.

The why behind the high-end Production

So why did we need such an advanced setup for a practice app? The answer lies in the complexity and precision required to capture Baseworks movements and to ensure the instructional efficacy.

The challenges of filming for Baseworks

1. Baseworks is very detail-oriented. It requires precise movement demonstrations from different observational perspectives, sometimes simultaneously, to break through common preconceptions in movement, explain exactly what the movement is, and what it is not.
2. When we teach in-person, we observe and adapt our instructions, providing extra explanations and offering different movement tasks as needed. For a video-based learning tool, we had to plan for a self-paced learning environment. This required us to include detailed explanations and alternative movement tasks in advance. We had to think ahead and try to cover all possible needs and instructions that might come up in the future.
3. Our footage needed to be modular, allowing seamless re-edits to create diverse practice sessions, similar to that of building with Lego.
4. To focus solely on the movement, the footage required a distraction-free background and interchangeable views.
5. Lastly, improving the visual sense of space and movement is an important result of training in Baseworks. Even if someone wasn’t interested in design before, our training can stimulate an eye for aesthetics. Because of this, we wanted to consider the “aesthetic eye” of both people who already have a good sense of aesthetics and those who will develop it through the practice.
6. And of course, with all the challenges above, we wanted to find a way to make the post production editing as smooth as possible.

Our solution to address versatility, functionality, and aesthetics

Here are some key strategies we used:

1. Multi-Angle Filming:
   Utilizing 4 to 5 cameras simultaneously and organizing the main view in real-time with a mixing monitor, allowed us to capture every necessary angle for precise movement demonstration. And although there was a live mix recording captured, the tech that we used also created separate files for each camera angle in case we needed to fix anything in post.
2. Infinity Wall:
   The professional movie studio’s infinity wall gave us a clean, distraction-free white background, enhancing focus on the movements.
3. Aesthetic and Post-Production Efficiency:
   We worked closely with Nicci to set up the cameras and lighting to achieve homogenius settings across all the footage with pre-configured white balance and LUTs to avoid extensive light and color correction in post.
4. Content Library Pre-Planning:
   We meticulously pre-planned the shooting scenes to enable us to film hours of footage, resulting in thousands of clips. Apart from the main practice content, the library includes over 1000 separate movements, with both correct and incorrect demonstrations, useful for diverse instructional videos and to produce complimentary support material.

The outcome

These efforts led to diversified footage used across the Platform, including Practice sessions, Form, and Meta videos. Despite the amount of time we put in to plan, create and release the beta and launch phases of the APP, we’ve really only scratched the surface, utilizing less than 10% of the footage captured.

We extend our deepest thanks to Nicci and the entire 10BAN crew for their dedication and experience in collaborating with us to realize this comprehensive resource.

Cool trivia

Did you know that doing slow movements while staring at the endless white of an infinity wall makes you really feel how much vision contributes to balance? Standing on one leg while looking at this white space is more confusing for the brain than doing it with your eyes closed.

Check out the platform here.