ProVideo Coalition.com: Stunning Good Looks by Art Adams

An accordion-playing lead singer; a drummer who occasionally uses a doll instead of drumsticks; and a song based on the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Just another day on set with one of the most macabre bands in existence: the Tiger Lillies.

The email’s subject line read “A Beg, Borrow or Steal Production.” One look at the sender’s email address guaranteed that the only suitable response was “Sign me up.”

I’d worked with director Mark Holthusen once before, on a spot for San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. Shot on RED in one day, the piece required numerous visual effects including crowd replication and rotoscoping messages onto walls and buildings. One look at Mark’s web site reveals that effects like these are no big deal: he regularly creates fantastical still images in Adobe Photoshop that are up to 400 layers deep. “After Effects is Photoshop with a timeline,” he told me. “It took me a day to learn it.”

His foray into spots and music videos is a natural extension of his print work, and fortunately for me he has no interest in being a DP. My challenge is a unique one: I have to figure out how to give him the elements he needs for his compositions while staying on time and budget. That’s especially important for the Tiger Lillies video as there is a finite amount of time to shoot and almost no budget.

As Mark’s connections are primarily in the stills world, I called on a few of my friends and coworkers to help out. My regular gaffer, Alan Steinheimer, was available for only one day of the shoot, but he gave us a deal on his 4-ton truck and sent gaffer Ernie Kunze to fill in for him. Adam Wilt’s employer, Meets the Eye Productions, is in the process of building two sound stages, and as neither of them were finished he offered us a deal on one of them with the proviso that we give him feedback to help him improve it. He also offered us one of his company’s RED camera packages, with himself as camera assistant.

Lining up on a shot of lead singer Martyn Jacques. Left to right: Martin, camera assistant Adam Wilt, me, key grip Kyle Rudolph, and director Mark Holthusen. TB

The music video won’t be finished until sometime in February of next year, but read on for a sneak peak behind the scenes of a very compelling and bizarre work of art. Please keep in mind that all composites are very, very rough and have been assembled simply for the purpose of editing a rough cut before serious compositing begins.

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Outstanding article, Scott, thanks for taking the time to document the shoot and explain your artistic decision-making process.

Posted by Mark Spencer on 11/10 at 10:26 PM

Hi Adam,

Enjoying your posts.

Two questions (for now…):
- What instrument for your “fill from the key side”
- Why the flag between your key and fill, as seen
in your first picture of the setup or the
YouTube video say @ 2m58s?

Best

Igor

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/11 at 05:48 PM

Hi Igor-

The fill was a 1200w PAR bounced into the 12x12 muslin-over-grifflon assembly.

The flag between the key and fill was most likely just to keep light spilling off the 4k and 6k PAR lenses from flaring the lens or blinding the operator (me!).

-Art

Posted by Art Adams on 11/11 at 06:17 PM

“Hi Adam” ?!?

Sorry Art bout that!

While i meant Art, maybe it has to do with the mentioning of Adam Wilt in your article.
Two persons with ‘Adam’ in their Name/Surname,
and it somehow stucked ...

BTW, being at your site http://www.artadams.net/ long time ago, and seen your posts at CML.

No hard feelings?

Thanks for your reply.

Cheers

Igor

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/11 at 07:03 PM

Art says, “I can’t close this article without saying some nice things about Adam Wilt.” I find this odd, because I didn’t get him coffee even once. Aside from that, I just tried to behave professionally and do my job; why should that be a surprise?

Tim has posted a slideshow of more behind-the-scenes photos for those who might be interested.

Posted by Adam Wilt on 11/12 at 04:38 PM

Don’t worry about it, Igor. You’d be surprised how often people call me “Adam” even when I’m not around Adam.

Posted by Art Adams on 11/12 at 04:40 PM

Adam, I don’t take anyone for granted. I was very happily surprised, as it’s not a job that one normally picks up easily. It sure took a while for me to learn it, back when I was doing such things.

We’ll work on the coffee thing.

Posted by Art Adams on 11/12 at 04:48 PM

What fun read! I really look forward to seeing the final product. I’m a little curious about your RED workflow on set. You say you had some problems with the drive, but did you transfer/preview anything on set?

Thanks,
Bjarki

Posted by Bjarkovic on 11/13 at 10:19 AM

Whenever we accumulated a half hour worth of footage the drive was taken away for backup. While shooting we limited ourselves to in-camera playback as the problem occurred when we rolled, which is not a great time to stop everything and check data integrity.

Any clip that played back in-camera seemed to work fine, and although we ran into drive errors four or five times we never lost any data. But your heart sure does sink when that big red message appears in the finder as you don’t know whether this is a transient issue or if your drive just crossed the River Styx, and without paying the ferryman.

Otherwise we backed the drives up in three different places and I checked footage at lunch and at wrap in RedCine. I believe Adam was also scanning through footage during/after backup.

Posted by Art Adams on 11/13 at 10:27 AM

I see. I haven’t run into those drive failures (yet), but I can almost feel the stomach-wrenching astonishment of reading that message.

Thanks again!

B.

Posted by Bjarkovic on 11/13 at 10:33 AM

I never ran into them until recently. I’ve heard rumors that they are related to early Build 20 releases, but I don’t know that for sure.

I’ve never lost a bit (byte?) of footage from a RED shoot, but recently I’ve had a lot of situations where I thought I might have. For quite a long time RED camera issues were things that happened to other people, but starting with a shoot I did in August I’ve caught up.

I do like the camera, but it’s an odd duck…

Posted by Art Adams on 11/13 at 10:50 AM

We were running build 20.1.3, and seeing the occasional SATA error on playback and/or ROCKETIO error on recording. The SATA errors typically cleared themselves with a retry or two. The ROCKETIO error once required rebooting the camera before we got around it.

There is a 20.1.6 build to work around SATA-TRANS errors during recording, but as our errors were different and infrequent and we were able to proceed with, at worst, a reboot, I didn’t want to stop production to load new (and untested by us) firmware.

I also had a backup RED ONE we could have pressed into service had our primary camera gone more severely pear-shaped.

As to backups, data-wrangler Michael Horevaj would dump the footage to a G-SAFE (I think) RAID 1 drive and verify playback. Then I dumped the footage to our ReadyNAS RAID and verified that all the clips played in Redcine. Then, with Michael’s and Art’s permission, I put the drive back on the camera cart for re-use.

At the end of the day I also rsynced our working ReadyNAS to a backup ReadyNAS in a different part of the building (not waiting for the automated midnight backup, grin). So we had two RAIDed copies before the RED DRIVE was returned to use, and three RAIDed copies by the end of the day, and all copies were tested for proper playback.

Posted by Adam Wilt on 11/13 at 11:02 AM

I particularly liked Adam’s method of making damn sure we were good and ready to reformat the drive before actually doing so.

Posted by Art Adams on 11/13 at 11:08 AM

Virtual double-bagging. Impressive.

Posted by Bjarkovic on 11/13 at 11:09 AM

Great stuff Art. Love it.

Posted by Kendal Miller on 12/09 at 10:01 AM

Great work, thanks for showing the “meat and potatoes” behind the scenes, really helps to understand the end results.

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