Behind The Lens

A blog about Cinematography, Photography, Lighting, Technology and Creativity. Specializing in Digital Video Production, Music Video Production, Red Scarlet, Canon DSLRs, Fashion Photography and Fine Art Photography. For more about our company and team visit our website: GlassWorksMultiMedia.com

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Pages and The Out of Hand Band "Till I'm Gone" Music Video

Pages and The Out of Hand Band "Till I'm Gone" Music Video

written by: Randy Valdes - Director
edited by: Roxana Clares

The song Till I'm Gone speaks of individuality, unity and peace; principles I personally admire. Therefore, it became important that the video reflected and amplified the message, and did so under an extremely limited budget. This has been our music video assignment subject to the greatest variety of concepts. Although the band members liked our ideas, calculated costs continuously amounted over budget. However, if you have read my previous posts you are probably familiar with our motto; when overcoming obstacles, the result is almost always better than the original idea. This music video is definitely not the exception.

In the video we find five adult characters, including Pages and Natalie, who have been primitively chained, from the time they were babies, before a television set looping violent images. Finally Pages, along with Natalie, rush to escape when his younger self inexplicably frees them. To their surprise, after running wildly through a forest, they come across a youthful group of friends who enjoy themselves and the nature around them quite innocently. These are the first people Pages and Natalie ever see outside of their small group of five. They curiously join the group and, for the first time, are introduced to the power of human touch, kindness, friendship and nature. Enamored with their discoveries, Natalie and Pages return to free the rest but they are stunned to find that, terrified by the unknown, not all their friends are willing to be freed. This is, in many ways, a borrowed concept from Plato's The Allegory of the Cave; a piece of literature I take great pride in having adapted to a modern hip hop music video.

red scarlet rentalCamera: Red Scarlet


We take satisfaction in finally having been able to shoot with the RedScarlet (from GEARstudioMiami). It was the first production in years, shooting on any format other than the Canon DSLRs. Although there were small setbacks due to the unfamiliarity with the format, the final product was overall a huge success and we were very impressed with the image quality.The most notable mistake we made was shooting the exteriors on ISO 250. With DSLRs there isn't much loss in dynamic range (latitude between dark and highlights) at different ISO ratings but with the Scarlet this is not the case. We have come to learn, since then, that it’s best to keep the Red Scarlet (as well as the Arri Alexa) at ISO 800, which is its native ISO, and use ND filters to compensate for brightness. Basically, when you lower the ISO on the camera, it is only a digital correction to the image processing; it doesn't change the actual sensitivity of the sensor. Therefore, you're essentially overexposing your image, and the camera is digitally correcting it to look like the right exposure, but any detail that is lost in the highlights due to overexposure is still lost. Another decision we made that I now disagree with is that we shot everything on REDlogFilm, which gives you the most desaturated image and lack of contrast. This is very good for color correction, but I now find that REDgamma3 treats the image much more organically, and in my opinion lets you see better the contrast ratios of your lighting on set. We have scheduled a test shoot-day with the Scarlet in the next few days and will post more thorough results and detail. Check back with us for updates.

Lens Choice: Nikon and Carl Zeiss

I find lens choice essential in storytelling. I wanted to use wide lenses in the dungeon scenes where Pages and the other four were confined. The great majority of it was shot with our Nikon 14-24mmf2.8, set to about 18mm focal length. I wanted these scenes to feel very quirky, taking inspiration from a lot of Roman Polanski and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's early work. These scenes should give the viewer, upon first impression, a sense of abnormality and unease towards the world the characters live in, without having to rely too heavily on art department. John Llambes of 1501 Studios, Director of Photography for this portion of the video, agreed with the lens decision and amplified the effect by opting for harsh and unusual camera angles whenever possible.

For the exterior scenes I thrived for the complete opposite; I wanted to shoot everything on long lenses in order to bring the characters, and the environment around them, closer to each other. This also helped in avoiding building structures and roads around the location that would spoil the idea of the characters being out in the middle of nature and far from civilization. Julien Diaz, of Merge-Studios, was undoubtedly the man to shoot these scenes. He takes pride in being a Director of Photography who favors Documentary style of cinematography, even in a production environment. All the exterior shots were handheld in contrast to the dungeon scenes that were mostly on tripod. This style helped in achieving the free and organic way of life enjoyed out on the field versus the frigid and overly structured aestheticism of the dungeon.


Art Direction

Art Direction was motivated by my fear of having the dungeon scenes resemble a dark brainwash scene. It was important that the viewers understood the characters were being molded from the time they were born. During our research, Elvis Suarez and I came across the phenomenon of Steampunk. I don't want to bore you with a long and slightly inaccurate explanation of what Steampunk is; think Wild WildWest and Micmacs. A neighbor just a few bays down from our studio works with heavy metal machinery and he was, luckily, willing to let us shoot in his shop.

The exterior location turned out to be the hardest to find. We spent an entire week scouting, negotiating, exploring and even pleading in our search for the right field. It wasn't untill the morning of the shoot that we found the spot that looked the part and was at the same time affordable. I must admit that finding the location took most of our effort and as a result art direction suffered. Luckily our friend and star in our previous video Juliet, and her friend Rachel Miller, came to set with several wardrobe choices, picnic blankets, and even hoola-hoops that livened up the scene.


Lighting

I’ve always been a fan of Robert Richardson and his photography in films like The Doors, Kill Bill, The Good Shepherd and most recently Hugo. His photography, specifically in these films, is lit in a way that partially disregards real world motivation for contrast, color temperature, and direction of light sources; most specifically in his use of backlight. The dungeon scenes were a great opportunity for me to explore with this type of lighting scheme. Elvis and I started our lighting plot with a 2K Arri Fresnel in the back of the warehouse, which served as our backlight. We then placed a 2KSoft light through 250 diffusion and ¼ CTS Light Gel as our Keylight. To achieve this type of contrast with DSLR's, but keeping detail in the highlights and darks, the backlight would have to be 1 & ½ to 2-stops hotter than the keylight, but the Scarlet allowed us to create a 3-stop difference. We then added a 650 Arri Fresnel as a very high kicker on the same side as the keylight but a stop hotter than the keylight. Finally, we used fluorescent tubes that were already at the location and removed bulbs accordingly to control light levels for background ambience lighting, which gave us a natural green tint native to household fluorescent light bulbs. The natural bounce in the location forced us to not use any fill light.

For numerous reasons we concluded by considerably sacrificing complexity in the lighting for the exterior scenes.  The rental of large generators and several HMI's, and the crew to set them up would have exhausted our budget. I also wanted to shoot during sunset hours, which put us under a very tight schedule that demanded we moved fast, and finally, I wanted to give Julien the flexibility to shoot from almost any angle at any given time, giving him the documentary scenario he prefers. All we had for these scenes were the sun as backlight and a M18 1.8k HMI through 1/4 CTS as fill. The Red Scarlet's added latitude gave us the flexibility to expose both our on-camera talent and the sky behind them with limited help from the fairly small HMI.

Post-production was very straightforward. Edited and Color Corrected on FCPX which is a huge upgrade as an editing software from FCP 7, regardless of the vast and erroneous commentary you find online regarding FCPX being a failure. I do, however, very much miss the program Color which was a much more powerful tool than the Color Correction tool built into FCPX.

Director & Editor: Randy Valdes
Directors of Photography: Julien Diaz (exteriors), John Llambes (interiors) Elvis Suarez (lighting) & Randy Valdes
Behind The Scenes Photographer: Elvis Suarez

Equipment Rented from:
Red Scarlet Camera : GEARstudio Miami
Tungsten Lighting Package: GEARstudio Miami
HMI Lighting Package: FilmTrade Equipment Rentals


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Till I'm Gone Music Video, a set on Flickr.
Behind the Scenes pictures of Till I'm Gone Music Video Production