Ryan Staake and the infinite space pole of strippers.

Okay…so let’s go back to 3 years ago when i got lost in YouTube. It was 2am, and like everyone else…I had eventually watched EVERYTHING and ultimately ended up on a video of “self-tying shoelaces” This, my friend…was a dark time indeed. More time and more nonsense went on, until in the top right corner of the suggested videos, I saw a woman on a stripper pole. Yeah, yeah…i know…boobies, man. This was a dark time remember? Give me a break. But, little did i know that this would have ended up one of the most interesting and technically amazing videos I have ever seen…and not for the obvious reason of boobies.

Meet Mr. Ryan Staake of pompandclout.com, The man behind a handful of other mesmerizing videos like Major Lazer’s “Sweat” ,  J.Cole’s “Wet Dreamz” and Alt-J’s wonderful carefree video for “Left Hand Free” The man is quite versatile and won’t paint himself into a corner with what he can do. It’s often quite rare and kind of ironic that a video depicting strippers on a stripper pole can seem so enduring, empowering and showcasing the actual art in the striptease, whilst other videos featuring women can depict the exact opposite doing much less. It just goes to show that it’s not a situation that makes the woman, but it’s the woman that makes the situation.

“I’ve always been into creating videos which appear seamless, with little to no sense of edits… Several months before the request to make a video for “Set It Off” came through, I’d shot some test footage of a friend pole dancing, and loved the look of it… there was definite sexiness to it, but the potential to add a bit of class to the depiction of beautiful, strong women showing off their skills.”

 “I did all the post myself, so it took quite some time. The quality of the 5K RED footage was impeccable… with its high resolution output stretching across all 3 of my 24″ monitors. But this massive resolution also had the downside of being incredibly slow to work with, even at 25% quality on a 12 core Mac Pro. There was a lot of experimentation in post, which also added to the duration of the process”

“The video is not intended to be photorealistic, nor CG, but some weird hybrid of the two; ‘hyperreal’ is a perfect descriptor.” — Ryan Staake