THE DARK SIDE OF JAPAN

The Dark Side of riding

This is a black pearl of cinematic beauty, featuring the new concept sport bike created by Yamaha. It's an intense ride along the dark side of Japan, through its clubs, its streets, alleys and highways.

We imagined the city of Tokyo as a dark lady who transforms her face at dusk, showing her most cryptic and ambiguous side.

Luigi Pane ^:g director

Looking for the dark side of Japan

"The Dark Side of Japan" is a film conceived with the DLVBBDO team, featuring the new revolutionary concept sport bike Yamaha MT-09. abstr^ct:groove imagined the city of Tokyo as a dark lady, who transforms her face at dusk, showing her most cryptic and ambiguous side.

At the beginning it seemed to be hard to find this “dark side” we were looking for. Tokyo is a very bright city, says Giada Risso, ^:g executive producer. The team arrived in Tokyo one week before the shoot, trying to study the atmosphere, the mood, walking day and night around the streets. The pre-production works in Tokyo included visiting clubs, talking with street dancers, and making test shots with 5D.

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Free-form improvisations

abstr^ct:groove team landed from Italy with a precise treatment, imagining all of the shots and a very structured plan. But after a couple of days in Tokyo they started to have so many additional visions and did a lot of improvisation because the city itself gave them many other suggestions.

The film has been realized mainly with Red Epic but many shots have been filmed with Canon 5D. Luca Fantini (DOP) did a great work, trying to catch the Tokyo spontaneus nocturnal atmosphere and lighting, limiting additional lights to the essential. Diego Indraccolo (photographer) "stole" some great shots with 5D. A Carl Zeiss 8 mm lens has been used with Red Epic for some extremely wide shots. That lens was perfect for the wild perspectives that Tokyo offered.

"We shot an incredible amount of extra material, it was impossible to limit the shots to the script, we were like kids in Disneyworld! There were so many beautiful images in front of our eyes and we had a lot of fun while shooting. The selection process was pretty hard but I was mentally prepared to come back to the studio with a bunch of material. At the end the final edit was not so different from the treatment, but some of the ideas I cut down in the final edit were not written or calculated. Let’s say that it’s always like this, but in Tokyo it’s maybe a little bit more."

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