Artist: PR3PE Director and DP: Lindsay Adler (Lindsay Adler Fashion Photography) Stylist: Lisa Smith Craig (4 Seasons Style Management) Video Editor, Colorist, VFX, Matte Painting/Illustration: Darin Andersen (DesignPoet) I’m a video editor and visual effects artist for indie films, and I’m often required to match or reinterpret different styles. For the graffiti in PR3PE’s Love Letter video I wanted three levels of artistry: 1) a simple clean tag, 2) street graffiti, and 3) a full wall mural. For the simple tag I went through a lot of fonts and found one that was stylized yet readable. For the street mish-mash I just painted some large text in an amateur graffiti style and found some stock-art heart drawings that I repainted to look like spray paint.
LoveLetter graffiti: before/after slider
For the main mural, I wanted to bring in some history like the classic retro painted style of the Stevie Wonder cover art for “Hotter Than July” but in a street mural kind of way. I googled “world’s best graffiti” and came across a piece by mural art collaborators Elmac and Retina. Elmac does the photo real faces and Retina does the abstract backgrounds. I loved Elmac’s airbrushed (almost vector) look with warm and cool lighting juxtapose against the abstract art. The warm/cool lighting reminded me of fantasy paintings by the Brothers Hildebrandt.
LoveLetter mural before: LoveLetter mural after:

Inspiration: mural by Elmac and Retina in San Fransisco

Because of how I was using it, I didn’t have to match their technical artistry, just suggest it. Using Lindsay’s Adler‘s album cover photo as a base for the portrait, I painted PR3PE in Photoshop using Elmac’s colors. Then I studied different Retina abstract backgrounds and started out with something he might do for the background, but, because it’s me, it ended up a little less abstract and a little more fantasy while still using Retina’s palette. The colors startedout much brighter, but get toned way down during final film color correction to make it look like a music video. The composition is only designed to look good in those shots and would look pretty awkward on a real building.  

Roto matte extraction (luminance key just wasn’t clean enough): loveletter_roto

before look development: after look development:

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