Swanks music video

S

speedbump

Well-known member
Here's the final draft of the Swanks video, a Denver band:

http://www.entertain.com/swanks/swanks_24p_demo2.mov

That's 3.5 minutes, 82.7megs.

production details:

DVX100, shot in 24PA, anamorphic adapter, edited with Vegas

Lights were a couple Lowell 150s, and an ARRI 350 diffused with a full stop silk

Kickin' industrial strength smoke machine. Never leave home without one!

We shot this pirate-fashion in a warehouse in Denver; the owners didn't know we had a key. They keep these huge floats in there year round, shrouded with big blue tarps. Heh heh

We had a 5500 watt putt-putt generator outside with long 10 guage extension cords (worth the price!) which was able to power everything, including the lights, the camera, a laptop to replay their CD track over and over, a small amp and a couple of speakers, and a small Sony 16:9 monitor. The generator ran for over 5 hours on one tank of gas. Amazing.

I learned a lesson from this shoot: if you are going to do a lip-synch session with a band, make sure you bring a powerful enough audio solution; my thrift store amp (which was actually a receiver with an 8-track in it!) didn't have the punch needed, and the band had some trouble playing along with themselves.

This is a 'final' draft, but I still have to do a bit of contrast correction on a couple of the shots, and format the video properly for 16:9, which will be a Vegas discussion.

Questions? Comments?
 
Re: Swanks music video

Hey :)

For 3.5 min of video the 85 MB is a little to much to download. Can you recompress it to a smaller size.
 
Re: Swanks music video

Definately compress it! My computer is as fast as most/any and this is sat and hovered at 8 minutes to go for ever! :-/
 
Re: Swanks music video

Hey Bump,

I replied to this late, late last night but now I don't see it. Perhaps, I forgot to hit 'send' when I finished? Perhaps, I dreamed it.

Oh well... I'll attempt to reconstruct my verbage verbatim. :)

Is that chick kin to Chrissie Hynde or what?!!!

I thought it was nicely done especially considering the short window of time you shot it in.

The B&W look works great for the atmosphere. It probably helped you not to worry about color balances, etc. of available light sources, as well.

The only thing that stuck out in my mind was in the CUs of the guitar player on the right, he was smokin' like a chimney.

However, in the wide shots he doesn't have a 'butt' going in his mouth. Minor point, but since it has the look of a one-take, one-location shoot it kinda jumped out at me.

Overall, great job!
 
Re: Swanks music video

I thought it looked great. B&W gave it great atmosphere. Excellent lighting, and great "dingy" effect on the set. Just two comments, first, the shots where you show all four screens at once look a little haphazardly placed. I know that this is a grung band, but that really stuck out to me. Second, is there any filter out there that could help the bass player. He has to be the scariest looking guy I have ever scene, looks like one of the Pirates from the "Pirates of the Carribean". . . .only a mother could love, right?
 
Re: Swanks music video

Overall I thought it was pretty good. I did notice the cigarrette thing that Terry spoke about. I am sure there is a way you could put a cigarrette in his mouth in post for those wide shots that he doesn't have one in his mouth!

As for editing, did you lay the Master audio down first then laid the band playing (wide shot) for the duration of the song then went back and made your cuts? If not, how did you edit it? Being as though I am a drummer, I always look to see if the drummer is on or off beat in videos and your guy was right on!

Would have been nice to see a crowd of extras in front of the band as if they were giving a small concert.

But like I said it came out pretty good. Was that generator pretty loud? Not that it really matters in M/V's since you won't hear it anyway! I am going to need one for a shoot I am doing soon and don't want to have a real loud generator.
 
Re: Swanks music video

I thought the video looked great as well. The black and white really looks sharp. I know that I sometimes forget how well the footage transfers over when you strip the color out, mainly because the camera gets such great color images (seems a pity to take that away sometimes).

My one big critique, even above the cigarette gaffe, would be that your editing slows down the whole momentum of the song. You have a lot of beats that you could hit to edit to, but instead, you took a very deliberate approach, which actually strips the music of its energy. In some places, the chorus in particular, you were editing very slowly, and it seemed like you were picking out the wrong band members to show (i.e. don't cut to the guitarist unless he's a) doing something that you can hear in the song, or b) is doing something interesting). And I agree with the post above that you're using the 4 split screens in places that might not be appropriate. I think you have to ask yourself, what is the purpose of that effect? It looks cool, but it can, most likely, serve a function too (i.e. to show them all singing a line together, etc.).

Hope any of that made sense and/or is of any value to you.
 
Re: Swanks music video

Thanks for the comments, people. I wasn't beat up nearly as bad as I thought I was going to be...

Ok then, replies.

Terry: Yep, she sure does look like Chrissie. Shanda is not a PETA person, though, for sure. I've really wanted to do a 'glorious black and white' project for awhile, and this one came along, so I jumped on it. The shrouds in the background are actually blue plastic, which look terrible in color, but in B&W the textures come out and they look great. Also, I knew that the band would look good in B&W.

What really put me onto B&W as an interesting look was some little video tutorial on the web somewhere where the author said, 'you light for contrast first, then for color, then for look' and it all clicked. I'd take my Sony monitor with 'Blue Only' switch and hit it when we'd first set up the shot. If it looked good in B&W, we knew everything else would fall into place. I can only imagine how DPs with B&W film get good photography...

The guy with the cigarette... I didn't even notice it until I screened this cut with the band! They watched it again, and said, whatever, we're a punk band, we don't care. But it bugs me.

Scharky: LOL about a beauty filter for the bass player! Aw, I told the girl singer that he was prettier than she was in the video, and she bounced an empty beer can off my head. Yes, the four screens are not evenly distributed. These picture-in-picture shots are how I decide what video track to cut to next. The points where you see four pictures were ones where I wasn't particularly inspired to cut to anything, and when I did a playback of the whole thing, decided to leave them in. Yes, I must fix their placement so it is uniform. Good spot!

DVX100shooter: I insisted that the band give me a CD with their song on it, and I prepared them to do a bunch of lipsynch by making them practice alot before the day of the shoot. I thought they did a pretty good job, especially Shanda, the singer. The drummer actually drifted a bit during shooting, so I had to spend some extra edit time moving his video around to match the soundtrack. There are places where he totally missed some of his own queues, which I chose not to use in the video. Editing makes everyone look better than they normally perform! Part of their drift was my fault, as I had not brought a large enough sound system to play back their CD track.

The generator is loud if you are standing next to it, but we moved it outside and ran a couple of 100 foot 10-gauge extension cables in for power. If we were trying to record sound in that environment, we would have had to take extra effort to muffle the generator, but in our case, it wasn't necessary. I can't wait until fuel-cell generators hit the market. If you are going to use a putt-putt generator and record live sound, you really have to shroud the genny so that your mics don't pick it up. If you run extension cables which are too small for the wattage you consume, they will get warm to the touch. That would not be good, get good cables and put your generator a block away, hide it in a trailer, or put it behind the next hill.

Sdelahoyde: you are right, there is a spot or two where the timing is not quite right. I just wasn't happy with the shots we had at those points, and didn't know how to make it better. But, we also made the decision that this video would have longer cuts than the usual MTV style. The average cut is 2 seconds, rather than half a second for some of the more popular stuff out there. And yes, I did linger on the bass player in some cases too long, but darn it, he's so compelling!

I will look at the video again and ask myself what story I'm telling at each cut. Thanks for the feedback!
 
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