One-take music video with puppets: AF100 and Cooke 18-100 t.3

A

Akornylak

Active member
"Boxcar Fair" by Little Tybee, shot at The Goat Farm in Atlanta.
Reposting here from the forum. Thanks for taking a look!

 
This is just an amazing piece of work. Gorgeous look and feel to it - it's so organic. I can't praise it highly enough. There are too many people pixel peeping out there and then there are folk like you and Zak just going out there and producing fantastic content. Lesson to us all.
 
Awesome indeed! Can you give us some background info, like why all one take, dolly used, lens, budget, etc?
 
This is truly beautiful work by all involved .. musicians, puppeteers, artists, and your work as videographer.
 
@JDY:

All in one take was the idea of lead singer Brock Scott. I had directed a one-take video for their band before (shot on Panasonix HPX170 on a Steadicam -

So when dreaming up this project with the set designer, Brock decided it would be fitting with the hand-crafted spirit of the thing if we tried to do it in one take, as you might watch a real puppet show. In fact, after the shoot, we performed the show for a live audience several times as a real puppet show, with the band playing live (and without the cameras. poured the dry ice for that one). So it kind of has that live-performed feel. Plus, we remembered the Nero shoot as being a lot of fun.

We used a Chapman Peewee dolly, lens was a PL-mount Cooke 18-100 T.3 with motor zoom - from PC&E in Atlanta. This was shot at 1080p/24 directly to SD card. I originally wanted to shoot uncompressed to a Nanoflash but we needed both output ports for two feeds so that the puppeteers could follow my framing - a projector for the puppeteers on the scaffold, and a wireless to a monitor for the puppeteers under the set. Brock pulled focus, Brett May on dolly grip. I think the AVCHD performed very well.

I lit the set with a combination of Westcott TD6 fluorescent banks and Lowell spots, as well as a few LEDs and headlamps-and-rotating-glass-of-water-on-a-turntable here and there. The set details were pre-lit with craft sources by the set designer Tom Haney. The backdrop was designed by Ram Bhat.

The budget was about $12K, which we raised with a Kickstarter project, but I would say it was a collaboration of volunteers, since the whole project took 6-7 months to create and an army of puppeteers, etc. Amazingly we somehow only had 1/2 a day to actually shoot the thing by the end. Since so many people were involved, that was our window of opportunity.
 
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