The following clip shows some of the visual effects I created for Marie-Pierre Jaury’s documentary on Wayne Shorter. The idea behind all this was to present Shorter as an infinitely-wise alien bringing love, music and originality to the planet Earth.

None of the effects shots were planned during shooting, so all compositing was done by hand in After Effects.

My favorite shot is the one that nobody notices when watching the film (which is unfortunately an indicator of a successful effect): the disappearing orchestra behind the bass player, John Patitucci. The idea here was to cut between two performances of the same composition (Over Shadow Hill Way), starting with a full-orchestra rendition and transitioning smoothly to the quartet-only performance. This was achieved by masking the foreground by hand, frame by frame (a couple of days’ work), and then carefully cutting to the close-up shot of Patitucci.

A few compositing experiments.