Hood Cry: Narrative Style Music Video (Rap/Hip-Hop)

M

meauounji

Well-known member
http://www.vimeo.com/15823195

My very first piece that I've taken from start to finish. I've edited some other projects in the past, but this is the first time I've written, storyboarded, shot, directed, edited, graded a piece all the way from front to back.

It's kind of a personal milestone. :)

fun facts:
  • Budget was zero USD outside of cost of camera and gear which I already owned. Everything else was borrowed.
  • This was shot using a... does it matter?
  • Pre-production was around 15 hours
  • The project was shot in exactly 15 hours (met at 9am, ended the day at midnight) The talent drove from Pittsburg to Richmond, VA for the shoot. I literally had only one day with him.
  • Edit took about 20 hours and had 3 distinct passes
  • Color grade took about 25 hours. Wouldn't have been possible without Colorista II
  • All the locations were about 10 miles away from each other.
  • We got 150 shots in the can and did them in 400 takes. Nearly every one of those 150 shots were storyboarded ahead of time. Final unique shot count that made it into the edit is something like 100. The rap performance only counts as 4.
  • We did have access to a shoulder mount, tripod, etc, but ditched them all for the sake of speed. A vast majority of the video was shot using only the bare DSLR and a Z-finder.
  • Almost the entire video is shot at f8 and f11 to alleviate focusing issues.
  • The entire video was shot using one lens.
  • The gun is real!

Comments and suggestions are welcome, especially in the areas of sequence design and shot selection, editing, and color grading. Please try to restrain yourself before going nuts and telling me how shaky the camera work is. I know, I'm the one who decided not to use any of the gear we had.
 
It looked pretty good.

The only thing that I thought was awkward was going from available light shots to lit shots. the change in the lighting was really drastic and the sudden disappearance of the noise was kinda strange....

That being said, most people probably wouldn't even notice that.

Good job, really well done, especially considering the budget :P
 
JPM Photography said:
The only thing that I thought was awkward was going from available light shots to lit shots. the change in the lighting was really drastic and the sudden disappearance of the noise was kinda strange....
Click to expand...

Agreed. I'm assuming you mean when he's going through the hallway leading into the gambling area? That's the only non-rap performance that was lit. In the future, I plan on making more use of fast primes. The one lens that I had was f2.8 zoom and in that dark area, I had to crank it all the way up to ISO 2500-3200. The rest of the video stayed around 400-1250 or so.
 
Honestly IMO you need to use DOF in your productions. It really makes images look really nice when used properly. What's the point of using a DSLR and shooting and such an high f stop? Overall I would say the quality looks nice, but really did not like the song at all. You have a rapper rhyming off beat and really not that talented.

5/10
 
life4eva said:
Honestly IMO you need to use DOF in your productions. It really makes images look really nice when used properly. What's the point of using a DSLR and shooting and such an high f stop? Overall I would say the quality looks nice, but really did not like the song at all. You have a rapper rhyming off beat and really not that talented.

5/10
Click to expand...

As stated in the original post, it's to alleviate focusing issues. When you factor out travel time between locations, we had about 13 hours to knock out 150 shots. That's an average of 11.5 good takes per hour or about 5 minutes per shot. Having said that, we did it all in 400 takes, which actually means that average time per shot of about 2 minutes! With the time pressure on our back, I did not feel that I had enough time to set marks and use DOF properly, and made the decision to get all the shots we planned versus getting half of them with shallow DOF.

Having clarified my reason for shooting at such narrow apertures, I agree with you that if I had the time, shallower DOF would've been really nice. I appreciate the comment. Next project I'm working on, I will have more time to make better use of DOF as a tool so I'm looking forward to that.

I won't comment on the song and artist himself since I couldn't really affect that...
 
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