Rock Music Video with Dual HVX200s

J

JonathanLB

Carbonite Member
Well in late February this project started its pre-planning and idea phase. I had wanted to do a rooftop shoot for a while, but only with a concept that could make it original, i.e. there are lots of rooftop music videos and it has to have something new about it to me otherwise I feel like I'm re-inventing the wheel basically. I had this concept where day and night performance footage would switch between one another for a song that expressed some sort of emotional turmoil, or indecision, or even a "good times, bad times" song, where you could fit the concept with the lyrics in a way that made sense. Then I added a story to that concept and that location and came up with this video for a song titled "Winded" by a band called Rockchild.

You can see the credit list at the end of the video so I don't need to say too much there I guess, but I had a great team, a really professional DP (I think it was his 25th music video), and just a great attitude from everyone on set. I really felt like we had a team atmosphere where people were excited by what we were doing. Pre-production was a nightmare, we switched locations once, went through some concept changes, switched DPs once as well (and I love my DP for this project, can't wait to work with him again), actress didn't respond to numerous calls and e-mails before the shoot so I had to replace her the day before (and got a gorgeous lead anyway, I think this girl turned out better anyway), one grip (who helped on my last music video) was stranded in Chicago because of airline cancelations, canceled 9:15 p.m. the night before so we filmed short a grip. Actually originally we wanted 6 people in the grip / electric department, but we had 4. Somehow, we were still 45 minutes ahead of schedule! Unheard of for a shoot in my experience. It was very tight early in the day during story stuff, we had no time to spare, but we finished the night performance 50 minutes early (permit ran until 10 p.m. and we finished at 9:10) because we already had everything setup from the day performance. Shoot was about 11 a.m. (call time) to just past midnight but we didn't get everyone out of there until about 1:30 a.m.

Editing was a nightmare too, I started to lose a bit of patience at times with the miniscule changes the band wanted, but that happens a lot. They are a good group of guys. It's just the editing room can be tough because I see my job as making the musicians happy, yet I'm the director so ultimately I have to make calls that I think make sense for the video. Ultimately it's such a collaborative process and it's so time-consuming that it's understandable there are tense moments. In the end I think that leads to a better video, though, and I hope the band is happy with it. I think they are now! I worked on this with my editor (and later the band) on 17.5 hours Sunday, 1 p.m. through 7:30 a.m. On Sunday another 10 hours doing final coloring (we had tinkered but the cuts had to be locked down of course before the final), DVD creation, exports for the Web, etc. I spent Friday finishing the wrap book, which was about 175 pages long full of contracts, documents, etc. That's not the fun part but you can never be too organized or careful with that kind of thing.

The link I'm posting has four versions, by the way, the first is the finished version with credits added (for festival submissions, fun, etc.). The official version has no end credits, of course, as music videos don't. It was just fun to give everyone some credit. The behind-the-scenes video also might be fun for you guys to watch, but I wouldn't recommend the day and night versions we put there (performance only versions) unless you really have time to kill. They are just for fun, the editing is a LOT more rough than the final version, I'm sure there are all kinds of not-perfect shots or cuts that are 2-3 frames off, they still both look good to my eyes, and we did work on them, but come on, we can't put 20 hours into just "for fun" cuts.

Without further verbage...

http://www.shutzi.com/rockchild/

Oh yeah, any questions just ask of course, but someone will ask. Stock lenses. DP didn't want to use lens adapter, wasn't worth the light loss I guess in the night scenes, and if we didn't use them at night I think both DPs I had aboard this project at one point said it might be strange to have lens adapters on part but not all. I do own a RedRock M2 adapter and 35mm lenses, but not two. The B camera operator on this video, by the way, is a very good director. He's a commercial director and has done several fairly decent budget music videos, he's way more experienced than me so it was kind of neat having him aboard.
 
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WOW, that was the fastest three min of my life ever.

Great Video, keep them coming Shutzi!! Good job love the color correction. That actress in the video is extreamly gorgeous!
 
first thanks for your compliments on my farewell to freeway video.

I hope i dont offend but these are just things that came to mind once watching the video.

i loved the color correction and the crispness of your shots i was very impressed at how the lights shine through even during the day and the backdrop of the city just looked damn good.

as far as your editing goes i find i have personally grown out of the "handheld and cut right before you make a huge move" style i did it quite a bit when i got started so im a little biased. i would like to see more shot based rock videos versus all hand held and a little bit of crane????

Your pacing was excellent but why did you choose to bring back the day time footage in the end? i thought it would have looked really nice to maybe split the video into two with day in the first half or night in the second OR wait till the song really climaxes say 3/4 of the way through them drop the night time footage on the viewer HARD and rock out to the end. Either way i loved it but i found that bringing the day time back in the end rather jarring but i just read your first paragraph after typing all this about creating turmoil so maybe it worked who knows!!

good work
 
Actually none of the video was handheld at all. There were 41 total takes of the song, which is actually 21 takes filmed by two cameras with one take that just had one camera (night and day). It was all tripod, jib, and dolly. Only 3 takes were dolly, I think 6 were jib, and the rest were tripod. I was surprised at first the DP didn't opt for any handheld shots, but I guess he figured they could get the same type of footage from tripods but less shaky.

I'm not quite sure I know what "cut right before you make a huge move" is. The cuts are on the rhythm for the most part, at least when there are no vocals.

As far as day / night, it would ruin the concept of the story (or rather I think there would be little story at all) if it just switched from day to night once. There's no meaning in that, it's more like, "Gee this is fun, we recorded footage in the day and the night, not really sure why but it was cool!" This has meaning the way it's cut, but you have to look for it. I like my music videos a bit smarter than just letting the audience get away with turning their brains off. That's what most music videos do, and that's fine, but I prefer to imbed something else there besides just the cool factor. The whole video revolves around day and night, so if you miss that theme you definitely miss the point. Then I have to rely on it being "cool" enough for you to enjoy despite that, which I think it still succeeds at but it's kind of not as powerful. Every scene where the couple is having a good time, even the first bar scene, it is day. Every time it's just him, it's night. When the couple has the first "fight" we see, on the roof as the sun sets, the sun is also setting on their relationship, perhaps (the song leaves this up in the air but it's certainly possible). Following that scene it is briefly night performance, with night and day performance always being used to symbolize similar things, essentially his interest in staying with her is reflected by the cutting. When it's day, he's happy and he wants to stay with her, when it's night, he's contemplative, at least, and at worst he's wanting to leave her.

It's funny in a way to me the day / night at the end is jarring to you, that's good actually, it's kind of supposed to be that way, but I found it much less jarring than I thought it would be on paper. I thought, "This will never work, you mix day and night footage quickly and I'm not sure it'll look right," and when I saw it I thought it worked brilliantly. I was actually impressed, one of those things that works better than you planned it. But the reason it switches like that is also for story reasons, not for cool factor. I just had three flashbacks of the guy thinking about bad things this girl has done to him (caught staring at another guy, the text message flashback, and not showing up / standing him up), and if I ended with all night footage as I actually had in my concept, I realized in the editing room that I was telling viewers "it's over." I was showing there is no hope for this relationship. That's not fair to the song because the song clearly leaves an opening, "it depends on what you want from me, it depends on what you need from me," so I wanted to leave an opening, too. That's why the day performance footage made sense, not only to convey a sense of indecision and frustration, but to add back the possibility he does stay with her (at least for a while). Now I think the impression is probably 75% that he'll dump her, and I'm fine with that, I don't mind it leaning towards that direction but I wanted to leave the door open so to speak.

I'm only giving you that long explanation because you were curious about why I brought the day back, lol, so hopefully that makes sense now at least, even if you don't agree with it visually or whatnot. At least you know there was a reason behind it! ;)

Thank you for the commentary, and yeah I really liked your music video for sure, somehow I liked the song quite a bit too and I don't even really like that hardcore type of rock usually, but there are exceptions (I love In Flames) and that was one of them. I found I started liking the song more as I watched more of the music video, too, not sure if that was because of the music video or the song just changed, but either way I think you added to the song.
 
Nah afte reading your first post i totally got why you brought it back and i immediately noticed the color tones throughout the story line. it worked perfectly i just needed a little bit of a nudge to see it differently

what i meant by the freehand editing style is ive noticed in many rock videos this style where the camera is freehand as well as the zoom. Since the camera operator is moving around basically not all the footage is usable since he/she would stay in one shot and then either move or zoom in or out etc etc. What is meant by the editing style is that editors when dealing with this type of footage tend to cut right when the operator either zooms or moves so you get a quick yet subtle movement to the end of your cut. I noticed it a little bit in your cuts and assumned that was the way it was done.


Either way great job like to see more of your work.

kory smith
Illusive Media
Virginia Beach Va
 
Ah, I see what you mean, sure that's true. The DP, who was A Camera op, and the B Camera op, both used a style of shooting I haven't seen before as much, where they were punching in with the zoom on certain spots of the song, actually trying to "feel" the rhythm with the camera I guess, it was interesting, really worked well at times, other times it led to certain shots not being usable, but we had tons of coverage. Actually the camera was never freehand, it's just that we had so many takes it may seem that way. It was always setup so that one camera was on one person, except for jib and dolly shots. So in other words we'd have both camera on the lead singer for one take, then next take both cameras on the drummer, next take one camera on the lead, one on the bass guitar, or something along those lines. The only sort of "roaming" shots were the jib ones and obviously the dolly kind of has to work that way I suppose.

I am much more accustomed to the style (because I've seen it before) where the camera operator (or operators) do handheld shots and sort of adjust or move their body position to get the most "interesting" shots. This time it was all done with the tripod and zooming in or out, which was definitely a new style to me, just because I was surprised they could get enough energy and interest out of shots on tripods. I was hesitant at first because I'm not much of a tripod fan traditionally, but now I realize it can be done this way that makes the footage more like handheld footage but a bit more stable, which is cool. It's something I'll think about in the future.

The next work up for me is just a ton of corporate work, I have to make a few phone calls about that today, but at least there's some money there.
 
I didn't want to cheaply bump this back up but I did want to give a festival update, hope that isn't bothersome. If so I apologize.

Winded was an Official Selection to Planet Ant Film and Video Festival (Detroit), Hermosa Shorts Film Festival, The Other Venice Film Festival, and Action on Film International Film Festival (Pasadena), where it was also nominated for Best Music Video. It won an Honorable Mention from The Accolade Competition. It also was the Quarter 2 winner for Very Short Movies Festival, an online competition, where it will face off against other quarters' winners in the future.

It still has 13 festivals left to make decisions.
 
Thanks. Oh, this was shot with the 200. I still just have two HVX-200s, my former business partner just got two HVX-200As, grr, hehe, jealous now.
 
Hey, I'm not sure if my editor used Motion or After Effects. I know he tends to prefer using Adobe programs for some things, he's used them longer, but we always edit in Final Cut because I am more familiar with that and like the ability to go back into my projects later, knowing what's going on. I'm not too familiar with Premiere. Then again, I'm not an editor either, haha. I can just putz around with some basic stuff.
 
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