Dezeen Music Project: Israeli director Gal Muggia aimed to create a "fractured reality" with stretched landscapes, digital boxes and pixellated heads in this music video for artist Adi Ulmansky.
Gal Muggia shot and edited the low-budget video for the track Was It You? by Israeli artists Adi Ulmansky and Borgore.
"After listening to the song for a few days non-stop, day to night, I came up with this image of a girl seeing her partner with a fractured head," Muggia told Dezeen. "It's related to the lyrics of the song and I just had this vision of these floating pixels."
"From there on I wanted to do something about living in a digital world but without showing the digital," he continued, "showing a reality that is fractured and stretched, and made out of digital things."
To represent a couple who don't understand each other, Muggia turned the head of one partner into an exploded patchwork of pixels.
In other scenes, Ulmansky walks through a distorted world where the urban landscape appears to be infinitely stretched up or down.
"I worked on it for a very long time until I came up with those three digital interferences: the cubes, the pixellated heads and stretched pixels on the sidewalk," he said.
Natural elements in the scenery are captured as if encased in cubes. These include plants growing between the rubble of an abandoned building and food in the apartment.
"I wanted to make an image of plants and growing things that have been put in digital boxes," Muggia said.
Filming took place in empty car parks, underpasses and industrial buildings around Tel Aviv.
"It was a very low budget so most of it was shot in locations where we didn't have to pay or without asking anyone," said Muggia. "We searched for a lot of abandoned houses, warehouses, places that would show ruins."
Scenes switch between these locations and an apartment that belongs to Muggia's parents, which was used as a contrast to the urban environments.
"We wanted a process of showing a very clean house and slowly going into a derelict environment," Muggia explained. "For me it's a symbol of the inner situation that occurs during this music video."
The shoot took place over four days, then months were spent editing the footage with two visual effects specialists during the team's spare time.
"We used a very simple DSLR camera, most of it was done in Aftereffects," said Muggia. "There was nothing added, all of the video and the 3D elements are things that we actually shot on set and included."
Was It You? features on Adi Ulmansky's album Hurricane Girl, which was released last year.