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Monday, June 16, 2008

It’s not the budget, it’s where you put the camera!

Equipment doesn’t make the image; people do. I proved this on a music video recently where we had more people than equipment.

It’s been a while since I last posted, for which I apologize. I’ve been working on taking my showreel to the next level by shooting a couple of spec projects.

One you’ve probably already seen: the Nintendo Wii spec spot I shot on the RED. The director I pulled in for that, Jono Schaferkotter, came to me shortly after that shoot and asked if I’d help him with a music video promo he wanted to do for a singer by the name of Rachel Williams. As I consider Jono to be a very talented up-and-coming director who lets me shoot cool stuff, I instantly said yes.

We shot said project on June 7th and 8th, on location in Santa Cruz. It was a down-and-dirty production, shot over the course of two ten hour days, with a very small crew and very little equipment. Having said that, let me also say that it’s some of the finest work on my reel.

Here’s the finished spot:

This was shot on a Panasonic HVX-200 and color graded using Magic Bullet Looks. Here’s what the cut looks like without the color grading, as I shot it (except for the composite scene where Rachel appears twice in the same shot, which is graded):

As you can see, I did quite a bit of post tweaking--and I shot with that tweaking in mind.

We shot 60p, recorded to a Firestore, because Jono wanted maximum flexibility in post. One of Jono’s heroes is director Mark Romanek, who frequently used slow motion for dramatic effect. After some experimenting Jono discovered that slowing the 60p footage, on a 60p timeline, to 33% in Final Cut Pro (and turning off frame blending) gave him the look he was going for.

The cuts above are about 85% Jono’s edit and 15% mine. He’s cutting an actual promo for the artist whereas I’m cutting something for my reel, so I opted to use some different shots in different places. I’ll go through that shortly as I want to talk a little bit about how we executed every shot in the video. We did this totally on the cheap: my lighting/grip package consisted of an Arri kit (2x300w lights and 2x650w lights), two extra light stands, two homemade shiny boards made using Reflectix, two white cards, two black cards, some grid cloth and a Cinesaddle. I never used more than two lights at a time.

Here’s what Reflectix looks like in action:

Available from your nearest Orchard Supply Hardware store. Look in the water heater section. It’s insulation material.

How to color grade your footage at home on page 2…

Cameras • Editing • Lighting • Post Production • Production • Visual Effects •

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