music video help

[Kylethatremains]

hey,

Im interested in shooting some music videos and i was wondering if any of you guys could give me some tips. for a band, how is this generally done? does everyone just play their instruments as usual, then add the recrded track in afterwards or is the recording played during the shoot? alos, how many times does it usually take to run through the songs?

thanks,
k

 

[jpbankesmercer]

You use playback on set if you are doing a performance video, (playing instruments), you don't have to do a performance vid though...it all depends on what kind of interpretation you wish to give as a director, (and what the band want), if you want to go down the first route...I would suggest covering as much as possible to help you in edit. Mix things up and try and give it an edge...check out the DVXclips section, its always a good idea to see what others are doing.
Best of luck.
J.P.

 

[toddgeer]

I am working on a pair of music videos myself. I have an individual with a Jazz song and a folk-like group as well. They're my first, and I've spent a LOT of time planning it. I would like to share notes with you if you'd like, after some googling I found little to work with.

So far, I've written up what I might call an outline, depicting what the end result will look like in general, as well as a shots list detailing angles, setups, movements, etc.

The video, from start to finish, will show the musicians in two or three different locations, not just "in the studio." I plan on shooting the "studio" shots, aka the shots of them musician-ing in a particular fashion, where everything is set up (lighting, wardrobe, telling them to overact a bit, arrangement of them, etc) then playing the song while they sync and dollying the camera around them, stopping to get CUs of their faces, their hands, feet tapping, guitar necks, mics, the whole situation. Then, do it again, probably 4 times, moving the track or doing it hand-held or on tripod. Then, go to the other location(s), get free-moving non-music-synced footage. In the end, placing all the footage on the timeline, aligned with their recorded piece, placing markers at measures and beats and cutting it all together, muting the tracks that are ignored at that point in time. The editing part I see as being the least planned, and the location, wardrobe, lighting, etcetera requiring the most of my time, all pre-filming.

I used Excel to create a table consisting of columns and rows, the rows being the measures, and the columns being lyrics, filming details (CU, tracking, etc), location, other notes, etcetera.

My biggest problem for my individual Jazz singer now is finding a location, mostly because the final shot is pretty specific, where I need a reasonably dark location in which she opens a door from outside and splashes light into the area. I take that small shot and mask it into a scene of her "in the studio," on her stool, finished singing, sort of like facing herself, physically and psychologically. It's a zero budget job, just to "do it" for the experience so I can't afford to pay for a real studio or other location, hoping someone will assist by providing the location for free...

T

 

[oneinfiniteloop]

I just got done shooting my first music video and here's my .02 on the subject.

Plan as much as possible, but make sure you leave time for getting inserts, etc. This was my biggest problem, I spent too much time getting a few shots, and it left some holes in my original ideas. Albeit, I shot the video in 8 hours, and my treatment made the performance part of the video very time consuming, but nonetheless...

For on-set playback...if you're shooting a band with a drummer (particularly a rock band) you need the music to be loud. They have to be able to hear the song, and also keep in mind your location. If it's outdoors, or a wide open space, you will need a lot more volume than indoors.

For sync, here is what I did. I created a sequence in FCP (any NLE will work) and I set it to start at 00:59:55:00, then I put the audio at 01:00:00:00. I got the tempo of the song and created a click track to start it off, usually four beeps to get the band ready for the song. I then applied a timecode generator to the clip and rendered out a Quicktime movie. I put this movie on my laptop, took the audio out's and plugged them into my playback, and shot the screen of the laptop at the start of every take. This way all I had to do was line up the numbers in the edit.

In the edit, I found it was easier to burn in timecode into all the clips. This was I could take the timecode from any portion of the song and match it with the timecode in the clip. This made the editing process much faster. If you use Avid, I've read that you can gang multiple clips to the same audio track, therefore keeping everything in sync. Sounds like a useful feature. If you have an NLE that allows multi-cam editing I'm sure you can use that to your advantage as well.

After that I created a rough edit. After spending many hours trying to figure out the best way to do the edit I decided on this method. I put my headphones on, turned up the volume, and closed my eyes and listened to the song. I visualized my edit then did this once more, only the second time I kept my finger on the marker button and hit it everytime I visualized an edit. When I was done I had all the markers and I just went from one to the next and selected the clips I wanted and put them in. This made it very easy because I could just grab the timecode from the markers, and go into that portion of my clip and grab the same section because of the tc burn-in.

The edits don't line up perfectly to the markers, but it gave me a good starting point. You could also do many different passes with the marker technique to see what different combos you would get. I found that most of the time my markers were pretty much in the same spots.

Good luck!

 

[heisest]

We did two stage music videos and this is what we did.

They created a music track just as if it were going to be made into a cd. That was the master sound that was played at the same time the band sang and played to the sound track. The sound board person would just give a three - two - one before he started it.

We had three cameras. One take was with them all on tripods shooting normal shots. The middle camera in the back was not manned but only had the wide establishing shot. The other two were just outside the view of the middle wide shot and would take wider shots of the main singers. (Foot to head with some zooms to waist/head) We usually shot two of these to make sure it was done right. (And the first was usually a practice for the 2nd one that counted)

Then we went hand held and did closer moving camera shots of the main singers. Then we did a third of the other band members. And a fourth of hand and finger plucking and anything else they thought would be good.

We did all the songs that way. Then when we saw we had enough time left we pulled out the crane and did a few of the better songs using it. But if the band is going to do a cloths change then you should figure out which songs to use the crane on first and have it ready in the wings.

Editing was simply matching the songs up in post and then stripping them out and inserting just the master track in instead.

That's what we did but that doesn't mean it is the best way.