A7s Dance video went viral over the weekend... on accident

+1 The stolen version is slow to buffer and play, but I loved your edit better as you were editing to the beats.

Wow! Just PP5 with Pro color. Care to share how you graded the material. Loved the grade one million times!
 
Nice job. And I agree with others here who say the remix doesn't make much sense with the choreography -- right from the get-go. Yours matches the Big Sean lyrics from "... with you!" and the dancers take it from there. The other version, ugh. Just doesn't work in my opinion.
 
I am curious how you handled the "HDR" type grading to bring out the sky texture. Is it automated or a good deal of power window/tracking to the dancers?
 
goodgoings said:
+1 The stolen version is slow to buffer and play, but I loved your edit better as you were editing to the beats.

Wow! Just PP5 with Pro color. Care to share how you graded the material. Loved the grade one million times!
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dcarstens said:
I am curious how you handled the "HDR" type grading to bring out the sky texture. Is it automated or a good deal of power window/tracking to the dancers?
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I'm really happy to hear you liked the grade on this. I'll answer both your questions in one! I think the circular polarizer filter I used is the real star of this shoot... without it I don't think there would be any sky data at all.


As far as the grade goes, I kept everything in Premiere CC14. I used a tiny bit of Unsharp Mask (somewhere between 10 and 20) with a radius of around 200, VisionColor's "Vision 6" LUT, Fast Color Corrector to add some saturation and match brightness across the shots the best I could, and lastly a very toned down/small amount of the Shadow/Highlight effect which was a *MAJOR* pain in the ass because it glitches out and causes flicker sporadically across some shots... this seems to be a common issue for people online and there is no solution for it. I studied its behavior and it looks like it happens sometimes at random at the cut point between two clips that have the effect. To get around this, I had to export certain sections that were glitching out piece by piece and re-import them back into the project. Major headache, but it was the surreal look I was going for so I had to take that day of pain to export it.
 
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Great video! The girls are awesome. Your Youtube channel should be the one hosting the remix so you can make a few bucks off the views. 8+ million hits is a decent chunk of change. Hope this leads to some decent paydays for you.
 
Samuel H said:
It does AF, but it's useless (even with Sony FE lenses, at least the 35mm f/2.8 that I tried). It's slow, and it hunts a lot.
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Actually I've found AF with the 28-70 FE to be quite impressive, no hunting, very smooth pulls just the right speed they are hardly noticeable, and quite good with face tracking on, only problem is sometimes if a whole face isn't in the shot sometimes it focuses on the background instead of the closest thing in frame. It's a little too slow to keep up with fast push-in or pull-out moves but can sometimes if you are careful.
 
Haha. Who needs focus pullers! Nice well done example of the whole blue / gold megatrend. Nice job overall.
 
Great job. You made it look seamless. It is not easy if the cinematographer doesn't have the understanding of dance. Now I see that your video has got close to a million hits. That's great. I am sure it will go a long way. Hope that helps in unravelling new opportunities for you as well. All the best!
 
No idea how I missed the FB link XD
Yes, your version is A LOT better, the other one just doesn't make any sense. The fact that their version is the one going viral shows that big fish are still big fish in the internet era: they have the power to bring the views, even with inferior content. But this time you managed to get on the boat too, so all is well I guess.
 
Great work! (from an old dude who would NEVER normally listen to that kinda music). Great creative, girls rock (would even if shot with iPhone), nice edit and color. I agree with McGee...like your version better.
Ride the wave of viral fame and collect the $$ on the other side from more gigs.
:thumbup:
 
timmilgram said:
So although I have mixed feelings about having my intellectual property ripped/shared on the wild-west-of-videos known as Facebook, my choice to let them continue promoting their remix using my video really worked out in my favor.
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I have seen both now and to be honest, the rip off doesn't do your work any justice. Your own version has it all, talented dancers, a great song and good camerawork but most important, there is a connection between how the dancers communicate and the song. The rip-off doesn't have that, it's "a" song on top of great dancing and camerawork and that's it, it just ruins the experience.

Now this might bring you more attention but I"m not that convinced it will be all positive attention, if I would be looking for someone to shoot a music video and came across the rip-off version I would likely move along, only because of that earlier reason I gave, there is totally no connection whatsoever between what I see and what I hear and this might make me think you don't have what it takes to make a great music video.
 
That was sick !! Your version kills it. The rip off rihanna remix was awful and out of sync with the gestures etc the girls were doing.

Expect a few more hits as i'll be sharing this on my facebook.

The girls definitely have a future in dancing, they're awesome!

And you definitely got a talent for filming music vids. All the best mate! It's a shame it took copyright theft for you to be noticed. But oh well.
 
@timmilgram,

Awesome video, nice touch with the aspect ratio change towards the end. The single location is great and does not get old. Your execution and talent, edit, camera moves, and (one?!) reflector (plus other things I'm sure) all went a long way and added some serious production value! Did you have access to the location or did you steal the entire shoot?

Did you need to get permission from Big Sean/E-40 or do you just need to add their information to the description?

It seems like it would be tough for dancers/choreographers to show examples without using popular songs.
 
Wow that was mighty impressive. Did you shoot it 4k or internal to 1080?

Edit: just read you didnt use a recorder so looks like internal
 
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My apologies, I haven't checked this thread in a couple days (I thought it was completely dead around Monday).

Thank you all for the kind words! I truly appreciate it.

rob norton said:
@timmilgram,

Awesome video, nice touch with the aspect ratio change towards the end. The single location is great and does not get old. Your execution and talent, edit, camera moves, and (one?!) reflector (plus other things I'm sure) all went a long way and added some serious production value! Did you have access to the location or did you steal the entire shoot?

Did you need to get permission from Big Sean/E-40 or do you just need to add their information to the description?

It seems like it would be tough for dancers/choreographers to show examples without using popular songs.
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Thanks Rob! We found that location the day before just by driving around (it was actually the first spot we tried). It was a granite refinery I believe... we drove in and asked this very nice security guard if we could film for 3-4 hours the following day and he said it's cool, which is very unusual for LA.

As far as music, nobody really ever gets permission from the artist for YouTube dance stuff. I wish there was a way to do that, as once in a while videos get entirely blocked and most of the time you can't monetize... YouTube and the label take 100% of the profits. Pretty lame but oh well, we do it cause we love it!

Thanks again!
 
Yes, if you use copyrighted music, YT gives the copyright holder all the ad revenue, and that's it. Unless they think it's not enough $$$ and they block the video (which happened to me today; lesson learned: you should always upload a test with the music you're going to use, before doing all the work; I ended up posting it on facebook, which is wild land in terms of copyright).
 
Samuel H said:
I ended up posting it on facebook, which is wild land in terms of copyright).
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I have had two videos of my kids messing around that I put to a track pulled from facebook for copyright upon upload scan. Wonder if it depends on which market you live.

When they start pulling simple family videos off facebook copyright has gone seriously off the rails.
 
Samuel H said:
Yes, if you use copyrighted music, YT gives the copyright holder all the ad revenue, and that's it. Unless they think it's not enough $$$ and they block the video (which happened to me today; lesson learned: you should always upload a test with the music you're going to use, before doing all the work; I ended up posting it on facebook, which is wild land in terms of copyright).
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What if the person uploading doesn't have ads? Does that mean it gets blocked because they think it's not enough $$$?
 
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