Supernatural - Music Video

[fixitinpost]

Last weekend I was the DP on a music video for the band Sweety. You can check them out at www.myspace.com/sweety.

This shoot was challenging on a number of levels. I'd never shot something on such a large scale before. Two days out of town, four different locations, all of which were extremely different. Night, underwater, the whole works. This was also the first shoot I've dp'd with an HVX. I've operated before, but never had this level of responsibility with the camera.

Screen grabs and bts below.

The first location was shot Sunday afternoon. An old church building that's been well preserved. We had to be even more careful than normal not to mess anything up. http://www.oldstpeterslandmark.org/

Porta-jib ready for action.

Take 2! First time I'd ever shot with a crane.

Uncorrected Grabs:

From there we moved to our next location. A fire scene at night way out in the middle of nowhere. It was a long drive, and the location was very dusty. It was a challenge to keep the camera clean. We wrapped around midnight. We also did a few candlelight shots in a wood shed on the location

Setting up for the fire scene. 2x1k with half CTB, and another 1k on the trees in the background. All running off a genny. Fire provided the fill.

1st AD Kyle sitting in for some last minute tweaks on the lights.

Natalie walks through the action.

Fire looks fantastic at 60P!

 

[fixitinpost]

2x1k with half CTB through the back wall for moon rays. Fog to define them. 300w with a double scrim and half CTB for fill. 100w with half CTB for a slash.

The next day we drove out into the middle of nowhere again, and shot some "chase" stuff. Glidecam v-20 was the primary support device.

From there we went back out to the woodshed from the previous night to shoot a daytime scene. Sun was at the wrong angle, so we used a 4x6 silver on two c-stands to get the light where we needed it. A 2x3 solid kept the wide spread under contol. These were the most difficult setups of the whole shoot. Crane on dolly on uneven ground, with a very exacting move required. It came out well, although it took a while.

From there we grabbed some food, and headed to our last location. The pool. The pool was made of a dark material, which looked much better than your standard white pool, especially as this scene isn't supposed to look like it happened in a pool. We were really worried about sticking to the schedule for this location. We managed to do it, and even got a few extra shots off.

We didn't have a proper underwater housing, so we rigged up a pretty sweet fish tank setup. I didn't take any bts pics here, and haven't gotten all of them from those who did. Hopefully I'll be able to put up a pic of it later.

We lit this with 5x1k. 3 on the left, and 2 on the right. For the stuff we shot above water, we got some additional fill from a 2million candlepower light in a huge ziplock bag that we could actually take underwater.

Having all that power around water was a huge safety concern. Everything was well sandbagged and tied down.

We wrapped the location pretty much on time (11:00pm), packed up the trucks, and drove back to Portland. Currently working as fast as we can on post. The edit is going well. We have a ton of colour correction, and a few FX to do. Hoping to be finished in about 9 days.

 

[fixitinpost]

We finally finished post. Check out the completed video here: http://www.etchantdigital.com/supernatural

This was a huge learning experience. I'd never shot anything like this before, and learned the hard way about what to do/not do next time, especially in regard to camera settings.

 

[dcarstens]

Thumbs up from me! You definitely got your money's worth out of that jib- the movement added a lot to the video. Especially liked the underwater sequence. As a former resident, I'm very happy to see some good stuff coming out of Stumptown!

 

[Mark Harris]

I think it looks fantastic and you obviously had a lot of challenges to take on in one shoot (church, underwater, etc.). It looks like you did an amazing job. The video looks really professional and sure-handed.

One thing you might think about next time - and I just got into this on my last shoot - is, if you are in a church like that again, SMOKE THE **** OUT OF IT. Get a huge fog machine and fill that sucker up. I dunno how big a fog machine you would need, but think about how all of those shafts of light would have played on the smoke from the stained glass windows. Also, the smoke would have given more size and depth to the church. I know it's big already but the semi-flatness of those images makes it look smaller.

Right now, it feels a tad like the church shots lack in drama, compared to the stuff with the girl. I think the fog would have put those church parts right over the top.

But you did an amazing job on this. Really great work.

 

[tommetass]

I checked out the 720p version..
Nice going there
Looks really good. The song was nice too..

one thing I noticed with the 720p version though was an extremely noisy picture sometimes.. the church shots and especially the fire shots.. They looked really grainy.. hmm, should do something about that if it's possible..

anyways.. good editing, nice slow mo and good song.. (and pretty girl ) hehe

 

[fixitinpost]

Thanks for watching! I'm glad you guys like it.

Mark: We had originally intended to fog the church. Even brought fog machines. But when we got there, it turned out it was a historic building, that they had already spent several million restoring. The whole fogging thing wasn't cool with the owners. I definitely agree, though. It would have been that perfect touch to finish things off.

Tommetass: Definitely a lot of noise. Part of this was due to camera settings (gamma, I think). We also pushed the image pretty hard as far as colour goes, and that brought it out even more. I've tried several things to reduce it, but haven't quite found the right thing yet. Any suggestions? I've found that when I back off a bit on the white levels of the fire and underwater stuff, the noise levels go way down. I'm contemplating sacrificing a bit of brightness for a cleaner image, at least in the HD version.

 

[DarkMatter]

How did you make the 720 p 2:35:1? Looks like you cropped it, or else everyone should look fat or disproportioned. Just curious?

 

[fixitinpost]

Yep, cropped it. Left plenty of room for re-framing the original 16x9.

 

[tommetass]

Tommetass: Definitely a lot of noise. Part of this was due to camera settings (gamma, I think). We also pushed the image pretty hard as far as colour goes, and that brought it out even more. I've tried several things to reduce it, but haven't quite found the right thing yet. Any suggestions? I've found that when I back off a bit on the white levels of the fire and underwater stuff, the noise levels go way down. I'm contemplating sacrificing a bit of brightness for a cleaner image, at least in the HD version.

I guess the best thing to do would be to reshoot it, but I'm betting that's not going to happen..
You could always use some blurring method to make the noise go away. Like if you blur the whole image then mask the blurring layer and then track the black noise...
but this may take a while.. :S

 

[IRecordThings]

Fixit,

Was actually going to comment you yesterday but my computer shut down; sorry about that. I agree with the above posters: nicely shot, good music, and a fitting mood. Didn't particularly get what was trying to be conveyed with the girl; maybe I'd need to listen to the lyrics more closely but it's a music vid so I'm assuming it's open to interpretation.

Did you do the editing for this as well? I'm particularly interested in how the alignment process works (matching all the different angles to the same audio track). Is there a special way of shooting it? Never done an MV before so I was hoping you could shed some light on that.

 

[DarkMatter]

Yep, cropped it. Left plenty of room for re-framing the original 16x9.

Thanks, I was actually more interested though on how you got rid of the black bars on the vid?

 

[fixitinpost]

IRecord: Thanks for commenting! To get what's going on in this video, you definitely need to pay pretty close attention to the lyrics (although it's open for interpretation as well). I didn't get it either until the director started explaining it in context with the lyrics which I hadn't paid very close attention to before.

As for editing, I was involved with the process, yes, although more as an assistant/operator. When cutting a vid like this, there are several different paths to take. The method we used for this video was one I'd never used before. We took each full length take and stuck it on the timeline, and synced it up (the version of the song we played back on set had a 2-pop in front of the music so we could easily do this). Once we had everything on the timeline, we went to the top layer, and cut out all the footage we didn't like. We did this for each of the 18 different performance takes, soloing each layer as we went.

This left us with a decent rough cut. We then went through and started making tweaks so it flowed together better. We also cut in story at this point. It's important to note that to cut like this, we had a wide, static master as a backup. This came in handy several times, as we didn't have any other decent footage to fit in several places.

That's pretty much our editing process on this one in a nutshell. We cut in Premiere using Raylight (proxy files, as we onlined in AE, and it doesn't have a native MXF plugin) at 1/4 res.

MOVIESTUNTS: The black bars were a challenge. Normally I compress in Sorenson Squeeze, and just add a crop filter. This is what I did for the small and medium versions. However, my copy of Sorenson doesn't like to do h.264 for some reason, and I wasn't about to put up a Sorenson 3 HD quicktime. The filesize would have been ridiculous. Instead, I started a new project in Premiere, at the pixel dimensions that I wanted the final output to be. The renderer was set to the codec I used for the master. I hauled my master into that, dumped it into the timeline, and the bars were automatically cut off. I then ran it through Adobe Media Encoder, and the dimensions remained intact. Kind of a convoluted process, but it worked.

 

[DarkMatter]

MOVIESTUNTS: The black bars were a challenge. Normally I compress in Sorenson Squeeze, and just add a crop filter. This is what I did for the small and medium versions. However, my copy of Sorenson doesn't like to do h.264 for some reason, and I wasn't about to put up a Sorenson 3 HD quicktime. The filesize would have been ridiculous. Instead, I started a new project in Premiere, at the pixel dimensions that I wanted the final output to be. The renderer was set to the codec I used for the master. I hauled my master into that, dumped it into the timeline, and the bars were automatically cut off. I then ran it through Adobe Media Encoder, and the dimensions remained intact. Kind of a convoluted process, but it worked.

Interesting. Thanks.