Breathe
"KraVen had this very particular view point about his music video. I had some initial problems with his concept, because their was nothing in the original concept that in anyway caused you to think of the word 'Breathe', which was the title for song. I suggested that we needed to show 'Lord KraVen', at some point in the video, away from the band, so you get the idea that he needs a space where he can just 'Breathe!'"
"I don't get all that many opportunities to direct a music clip, so this looked like a really great opportunity. But it almost turned out to be 'Hell's holiday!' With any project you are directing, there has to be enough creative room for the director to have their input. However, with 'Breathe,' there were so many creative people in the room that this turned out to be very difficult to do."
"To make it even more difficult, we had only two hours of production time at East West Studios in Hollywood to shoot five separate scenes. So you can imaging how time critical that was going to be! I managed to get the whole three camera setup including lights ready within a half hour. We also had a band member who plays with Miley Cyrus and he could only be there for an hour, so time was going to be a real issue on this job."
"To make an already difficult shoot, even more challenging, Tionne Williams had us all waiting around for a good half hour, which now made this shoot almost impossible to do in the time allocated to us. Then to make life even harder, the focus puller we had booked just didn't plain turn up at all! His not turning up, now seriously limited the type of shots I had planned to do. As you can imagine, there was a lot of running around to get all five scenes done within that last hour of the shoot!"
"We were using a three camera setup, so this shoot was getting pretty crazy at times. We were all having to seriously multi task to get it done in the time left to us. We had scenes shot in the studio, the studio hallway and studio lobby, so there was a a lot of work in terms of lighting setups. Fortunately, I can setup lights pretty fast, and I have had enough experience color grading to know how to fix the look of these things."
"The main concert scene was shot in the studio and for that I had the engineers set up an overhead lighting grid so that I had enough light on everyone's faces. This scene was mainly done using a Canon 5D using Zeiss lens and shooting in a technicolor flat setup for a more cinematic look. Which worked out really well when it time for me to finish it in color grading. Then I had a Canon T2i which we used to get pickup shots of the drummer. A lot of this video was made up of 'on-the-spot-shot-calling', because the shot list I had went out the window when the focus puller didn't turn up!"
"The challenges with this video didn't end there! We had 15mins to setup this one scene in the hallway, with all these super beautiful green and black colors in the background, so it had to be right!"
"The hallway scene had 'Lord KraVen' walking down the hallway towards the camera, so I shot him using the Zeiss E 24mm lens to make it as wide as possible. It all seemed to go so great. And then afterwards, I am looking back at the shot and I said to the DOP, 'Why is this scene looking so different. Why is it glossy?' To my surprise, the DOP tells me that he decided to shoot it at 60fps 1280x720 because he saw this scene being slow motion."
"Unfortunately, that was very different to the way I was seeing it. So now I have this killer scene, but with most of the resolution gone from it. Given that I have got to make this scene work with the rest of the video at 24p full res HD, this day was just getting harder and harder!"
"Being a colorist means that you know what is possible in post, like how to fix my hallway scene in Resolve so it looks like the rest of the full HD video. But the biggest problem has to be shooting the master footage in a way that it best for post production. Although I had some control at the time over the way the footage looked, the artist could only imagine what he could see on the monitor and not what I could do in post. So 'Lord KraVen' just kept on wanting to adjust things on location, instead of in post where I could have more subtle control."
"When we finally made it into post, I had to get 'Lord KraVen' to let the creative reigns go so I could finally do my job. Once we were in the color grading suite, he wanted to experiment with all kinds of stuff, so to begin with, we were all over the place with the grade. It wasn't until I could prove to him that certain looks were going to be all wrong."
"Once we got the whole thing back on track, I was able to create the right color highlights and finish it off to a pretty good standard. Given where we started, and all of the problems that beset this project, I think it came out pretty well. By the time we finished the three rounds of post that finally went with this job, I got to say that I really needed to some time to just sit back and ‘breathe’ myself!”
