Pages and The Out of Hand Band "Till I'm Gone" Music Video
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.
Camera: 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.
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.
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
Till I'm Gone Music Video, a set on Flickr.
Behind the Scenes pictures of Till I'm Gone Music Video Production