I traveled to Mexico City as Director-DP to capture Mabe's raw vocal performance across multiple locations inside the city, combining simple camera techniques and movements with glitch distortions and VFX in post for a dreamy, surreal music video.

Track: "The Cycle of Breathing" from the album Moot Point Director, DP, Editor and Glitch VFX: Sal Vanegas Music produced by: Mabe Fratti and Santiago Rodríguez Rebolledo Mastered by: Cem Oral, Jammin Masters Runtime: 5:41

Mabe Fratti is a cellist and composer working between drone, ambient and electronic music, since recognized internationally. EvilTapes is Santiago Rodríguez Rebolledo. The track is the opening piece on Moot Point: slow, cyclical, built on cello and processed texture.

Music that patient does not want a narrative video. It wants something that behaves the way the composition behaves, moving without appearing to move. The piece had to sustain almost six minutes without either telling a story or turning into wallpaper.

We started with Mabe lip-syncing the track in Bosque de Chapultepec. While pulling focus by hand during a take, I noticed the transition was producing something unexpected: a hazy, dreamlike texture as the plane of focus travelled through foliage. Not an effect, just what a long lens does when nothing else is holding the image still.

So I chased it. Continuous pan-zoom moves pulled as fluidly as possible, shot at 120fps to smooth out the small hand movement that comes with running camera and focus at once. The frame rate was a practical decision before it was an aesthetic one, and it ended up defining the look of the film.

That accident became the grammar of the whole piece.

We repeated the lip-sync setup in three more locations across the city, mostly downtown. I then applied the same pan-zoom-in, zoom-out approach to monuments, buildings and still city life.

Every shot was made with its destruction already in mind. Datamoshing works by removing I-frames and P-frames, which means it needs interesting camera movement in the source to have anything to smear. I was not shooting footage and then deciding to corrupt it. I was generating motion specifically so the corruption would have material to feed on.

Corruption was done in Avidemux by stripping frames, which produces MP4 files that are structurally broken by design.

"The Cycle of Breathing" Music video sequence. Datamoshing and Slit-scan applied to still-life style cinematography.

The final edit interleaves the clean high-resolution material with those recovered distortions: real-life mise-en-scène, slow-motion still-life beauty, and glitch, cut so the transitions between them read as one continuous journey rather than three separate treatments.

Seven years later, Sebastian and Daniel Selke of the Potsdam cello-piano duo CEEYS wrote to commission a 70-minute visualizer for their festival, Q3Ambientfest. They cited this video by name, referenced its exact timecodes, and asked for the same treatment applied to the architecture of their own city.

Mabe Fratti has since released widely, with collaborations including Lucrecia Dalt, Mint Field, Concepción Huerta and Tristan Arp.

Location: Mexico City, including Bosque de Chapultepec Cameras: Sony A7S, Sony A6000 Lenses: Two Canon zooms Capture: 120fps, tripod Corruption: Avidemux, I-frame and P-frame removal Edit: Final Cut Pro X Runtime: 5:41 Album: Moot Point, Mabe Fratti & EvilTapes