Perform This Way: The Music Video

[RyanHippFTW]

That's what he said...

Nah, really? That emoticon I had in there was just an accident, thanks for pointing out the obvious innuendo I didn't even notice when posting my earlier comment.

[Mad Genius]

After taking a few video production courses myself, I can say that this was probably done by way of chroma keying Al's body, along with the set, to obtain such an effect. Analytically speaking, my guess is Al wore a chroma key body-suit and choreographed the parts for the female contortionist he casted for the role of Lady GaGa during the shooting of the video, some time ago. The other thing is, if Al used chroma keying, both Al and the contortionist's choreographed moves had to be EXACT to achieve the optimal effect of Al's head being masked on an actual woman's body, during post-production.

People on the forum involved with the video have said that the body doubles had black dots on their face. Al's face was put on the lady's body, not her body on his...

Ah, that makes more sense. I was thinking about Chroma Keying effects after seeing it the second time around, but still, you've got to hand it to Al for the sheer shock factor and overall disturbing visuals the video has. I have a pretty damn good feeling that this video will be viral nightmare fuel.

[Apocaloso-88]

Ah, that makes more sense. I was thinking about Chroma Keying effects after seeing it the second time around, but still, you've got to hand it to Al for the sheer shock factor and overall disturbing visuals the video has. I have a pretty damn good feeling that this video will be viral nightmare fuel.

The black things in the face are used to track Al's face. Dunno if I've used the correct word in english, but usually, when you to this kind of effects, u put these big points so you can "hook" them easily...

[Mad Genius]

I figured, seeing since chroma keying would take a lot of precise timing if Al wanted the same effect, that way.

[Kristine]

Jon will probably pipe in with a more thorough answer, but here's the basics:
The dancer had black dots on her face for the shoot. These are to track her motion to line up Al's head with hers in post. Al was most likely shot with a camera sitting still on a tripod, only moving his head when needed for choreo (ie turning from profile to front). They take the footage of his face, mask away (rotoscope) and/or key out what isn't his face, and use motion tracking to transplant it on the dancer. As long as the angle and lighting are correct, they can change the size of his face to match the other video. No need for him to do any of the choreo. Motion tracking is pretty cool, and pretty cost effective- smart software helps out quite a bit. The software will recognize a set of pixels as it moves around (the dots). It doesn't do everything for you, but it saves a lot of time.

[TMBJon]

Well put, Kristine. I would speculate that Al was probably editing on his laptop a version of this video that doesn't have his head at all. The version of the video where it's just a female dancer dancing. And then he handed that over to the After Effects/Motion/Smoke artist who did the hard part.

[Orthography Enthusiast]

Here's Al's contortionist when she was only nine.

[ludovica64]

@Beauty_is_Pain was rather surprised and delighted to discover that their creation the leather tiered rainbow petal dress On the right here had showed up in the video


Why didn't you guys tell us #weirdAL is wearing our dress in his new video!!!??????? OMG

hey! He wears my rainbow colored dress with a horse headpiece at around :30 check it out!

Lol...imagine our shock to see it!! It was hilarious!!

@alyankovic Loved seeing you in our rainbow dress!! You rocked it!! #HONORED

Yeah, I love it, I'm honored, @alyankovic is a legend!!!

[Orthography Enthusiast]

I WAS gonna vote for PTW on the VH1 site, but I thought they were expecting kind of a lot in return for my vote. Call me old fashioned.

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[The Sporkman]

Holly Beavon, who played Madonna in the video, has posted some behind-the-scenes pictures on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set= ... 6935349668" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;