For Today - Agape Music Video

Cale Glendening

Cale Glendening

Active member
http://www.caleglendening.com/film.php
Watch "Agape - For Today"

What a nightmare my 2nd music video turned out to be. It was last minute and the band couldn't take a day off tour, so I filmed the day before at a school, which I was allowed 6 hours, and then the next day we shot the band, again only having 6 hours. Then we filmed that night at a live show, the last 30 seconds was played 3 times, and it was LIVE. No audio sync or anything, no set up, just them playing.

My dp had an onboard monitor he swore was accurate. A few hours into the school shoot I looked into the camera and it was about a full stop or more darker than the monitor. So due to timing I had to use what I got. As you can tell the majority of the school stuff was DARK. I was very aggrivated. Lesson learned. Is this a presentable video given the time I was given, and the budget? Be honest.

The budget on the video was 1k.
 
lol, a film permit costs almost $1,000, so you still did a great job with that ;) It looks good still. So I'm guessing every actor / actress worked for free? I mean I'm just trying to think how you make something for $1,000 with a story, lol, we spent more than half that on food on my last shoot.
 
Hahahaha yeah "actor/actress"
Yeah right. They were my friends. No acting experience was present on the shoot.
I couldn't afford actors.

I think I ended up making like $80
 
yeah. not my scene (the music), but for a thousand bucks i think it's great. Some of the edits jump from over exposed to underexposed, but i'm sure you already now that. Some of the shots of the lead singer seem a bit to pretty. Didn't match the (underexposed) shots of the other guys in the band. The school stuff looked great. Did you shoot 1080 24p on all of it??? I just got my HVX and haven't tried any of the slo-mo stuff -- what settings were you on?
 
I thought it looked pretty good. The live stuff at the end was cut in well... when you said you used concert footage I was kinda hesitant as to how it would turn out, but it looked good. Your actors did a great job as well for just being your mates, so you were lucky with that!

Overall the video looked great for $1000... I wouldn't beat yourself up about all the little things that went wrong... the most important thing is if the band is happy? And if they aren't, they should invest more money and time into their next video!
 
Yeah it's tough with bands because the unsigned ones just don't seem to have any money they want to spend on music videos. There are probably 97 bands out of 100 that might be able to get anywhere up to $1,000, like from $300 to $1,000, but very few that will pay even a tiny amount of money to make a pro video, which I consider to be like $6,000 minimum if anyone is to make a profit on the project. Otherwise you can do it sans director, just make the DP the director basically, no production company, just hired crew, I guess.
 
Vern said:
yeah. not my scene (the music), but for a thousand bucks i think it's great. Some of the edits jump from over exposed to underexposed, but i'm sure you already now that. Some of the shots of the lead singer seem a bit to pretty. Didn't match the (underexposed) shots of the other guys in the band. The school stuff looked great. Did you shoot 1080 24p on all of it??? I just got my HVX and haven't tried any of the slo-mo stuff -- what settings were you on?
Click to expand...

Yeah I believe that was when I was jumping between m2 and no m2.
The footage at the school was much darker than I wanted so I dakrened most of the footage of the band. Everything was shot 720, 24p. I will get back to you on my settings. I don't remember them off the top of my head. Thanks for the reply though! Much appreciated. I will get back to you!
 
Zeakio said:
I thought it looked pretty good. The live stuff at the end was cut in well... when you said you used concert footage I was kinda hesitant as to how it would turn out, but it looked good. Your actors did a great job as well for just being your mates, so you were lucky with that!

Overall the video looked great for $1000... I wouldn't beat yourself up about all the little things that went wrong... the most important thing is if the band is happy? And if they aren't, they should invest more money and time into their next video!
Click to expand...

Yeah I was hesitant also when the band said they wanted live footage at the end of the video...I knew it pretty much wouldn't make sense to the story but oh well. I tried my best.
The band was happy besides a little too much school drama....although I did discuss the video with the band before and they were completely fine with it. They liked the quality and the overall video, just some parts were comical to them I suppose. Understandable but man you should have seen some of the clips I had, some of the takes were HORRIBLE, cause noone had any acting experience. Sure was a funny/frustrating thing to shoot!

It is weird the band was given such a small budget, when they had so much hype going into teir first album on Facedown. I am doing a music video at the end of the summer for $200 or less....it is for a friend, so we will just see how that turns out!
 
JonathanLB said:
Yeah it's tough with bands because the unsigned ones just don't seem to have any money they want to spend on music videos. There are probably 97 bands out of 100 that might be able to get anywhere up to $1,000, like from $300 to $1,000, but very few that will pay even a tiny amount of money to make a pro video, which I consider to be like $6,000 minimum if anyone is to make a profit on the project. Otherwise you can do it sans director, just make the DP the director basically, no production company, just hired crew, I guess.
Click to expand...

Yeah true that, man it can get frustrating. The more you do for less, the more labels can think they get good videos for less. I have shot two videos and put in months of work and made basically a $1-$3 a day when I do all the math. It is weak, but I am very passionate about it and I know paying my dues will one day pay off. .....One day.
Thanks for the reply man
 
not so much a fan of them, but you did Agony Scene so that's pretty sick.

For the quick live performance shots where it's constantly zooming in and out nice and crisp, are you shooting at 24p and just cranking up the shutter? Or a higher frame rate?
 
Yeah you're right, well you have to do that at the start, I mean put in the time. Your time can save money, the more planning you do, the more hard work you put in, the more money you save and the higher budget you can make the video look. Eventually, though, we all want to make a few bucks from our knowledge and get paid at least fairly for our time. I don't mind even if my average is like $15/hr plus being paid fairly for the equipment I own, because I have enough equipment and work hard enough that my average can at least come out to more like $30/hr with equipment fees and working 10 hour days at least, you realize quickly that $300/day isn't THAT bad for doing something sweet, even if it costs you a lot of money in startup to get the equipment, learn the skills, etc.

I've yet to make any money shooting music videos, because I'd honestly rather do a video that's super low budget paying for it myself and owning the rights to the footage than take anything less than $1,000, still spend more than that, and be somehow indebted to the band. At least building my reel, if I own the footage, I can do what I want with it. I think I could probably pull off a decent music video for $1,000 now that I have more set skills, but before I really needed to hire someone to do everything and let me focus on directing and producing. I can put together a porta-jib quickly, assemble my dolly quickly, setup lights, rig power, etc. I just am not a good shooter so of course I'd always hire someone for that, but still I wouldn't work a crew less than 5-6 anyway so as long as I can do a lot of on-set positions besides JUST directing for smaller budget work I can save money that can be added to my pay potentially, haha. On the really low budget stuff you have to do more yourself, you just can't afford to hire people to do it all for you, as much fun as that is, haha.
 
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