Jack Johnson's latest, “From the Clouds,” is out and features him flying through the air in slow motion. It has the airy, loose feeling that a song referring to the sky SHOULD have but avoids being a cliché because it's rendered in black and white.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Johnson initially thought of being photographed while skydiving and lip-synching the whole song to that one drop.
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“But then, I figured I'd have to have some guy strapped to my back,
and that wouldn't look quite as cool,” he muses. So he and
Emmett found a 40-foot diving board at an Olympic training pool in
Mission Viejo, where a similar effect could be achieved just by
filming in extreme slow motion his somersaults through the air. To get
enough footage, Johnson, who plays acoustic and electric guitar on the
track, jumped off the diving board 50 times, experimenting with
backflips and belly flops. “I ate crap a few times, but it was really
funny.”If it doesn't look like a pool, that's because they turned on
Jacuzzi-style bubble vents to break up the surface of the water and
minimize impact. At the precise moment he'd jump off, he would try to
burst a water balloon so that the camera, shooting at 6,500
frames/second, would capture water droplets splashing off his face.
