Music Video for Helen Austin. Song aired on One Tree Hill

[pchristoph]

This was my first music video. I kept it pretty simple. Shot it in about 4 1/2 hrs.

I shot, edited, and directed it for musical artist Helen Austin. Her song aired on OneTree Hill January 25th, 2011, which is pretty cool.

Had a great time using both GH13, and GH2 cameras and a light ring that I built to get that cool fx look when doing the closeups of her eyes.

GH2 was used indoors. GH13 for outside in the alley.
f1.7 20mm Panny
f2 50mm Pentax
Edited in FCP
CC in FCP

Comments appreciated!

[Hallvalla]

Really liked the close-ups of her face on the black backdrop. Great skin tones.

[mojo43]

Looks great! I really liked the backdrop and the closeups. The light ring looks fantastic!! I also noticed one or two f the cuts were a bit jarring but I'll have to watch again. Maybe it was just me...

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

Ok, I'll comment on an effect at 0:40-42 or so, which I didn't like. There are a couple of other places where this happened and I'm think one or two things happened... 1) it was intentional... or 2) it was unintentional.

In either case... there was quite a bit of blur. If it was intentional, it didn't seem like it was really being controlled. If it was unintentional, I suspect it may have been due to using 'afs' auto-focus-single mode
which is really 'continuous' in the GH-1. I don't know if this shot was with the GH-1, or the 2. But in any case it looked like the focus wasn't locked, or under 'manual' control. In the case of manual control, it would probably be due to manual 'hunting' for the focus. So, what you might think about, is during your setup and 'blocking' of the shot, to mark the focus points on the lens with some sort of 'tape' or the like, and then just use those with a smooth motion to move between them. This would really assist in the 'rack' focus between the hands on the guitar.

There were some other techniques that I didn't particularly care for. The tacking with something occluding the singer. I know this is done, but this didn't work for me. Also, the lighting seemed a bit hot as well.

In terms of lipsync, while I didn't step frame by frame... it looked pretty good. I presume you used a studio recording, and had the singer match up her 'on video' singing sync up.

Editing seemed good. But again some of the transitions from studio, location, other view location, etc. I think could have been smoother. I think the music called for the slow transitions.

The outdoors shots looked pretty good in terms of exposure, etc. The one comment there, was some of the framing where the singer's head was cut off a bit by the top of the frame. Again that is a technique used, but I don't know if it works here for this music, or this moment in the music.