Hi Everyone,
I'm going to qualify the making of my video with a few anecdotes, since I know you guys are very technical knowledgable and experienced. I had been shooting since 2006 on the Panasonic HVX-200, but this was my first experience directing on the Red and it was on a sub $5K budget so outside of the shoot, I had to do almost everything myself. I'm a director and sound designer by trade, not a cinematographer or visual FX artist. I also didn't have a budget or time to do proper color correction and noise reduction before I left the country two weeks ago. I may go back and address those issues when I am back in the US. And lastly, I gave myself a crash course in After Effects and particle generators, which I had no experience with before a couple months ago. This is the first page from the storyboard I illustrated.
"The Wise" is written and performed by L.A.-based electronic musician Zaptra. I met him in a small close-knit experimental electronic scene. It's not your garden variety electronic club music. It's a bit more mysterious and unpredictable. I came up with the entire story and concept of the video, which involves a sorcerer summoning creatures performed by professional dancers. I chose to shoot this video on the Red because we were going to be using practical candle light in-scene and shooting with a lot of bright red colors, which had the potential to bleed on a lesser camera.
Because we went over time on our first setup, the dancers left after only 30 minutes of shooting. Thus, I had literally 10 minutes of useable footage from one master angle, so I had to get very creative to make it work. Honestly, I didn't know how I was going to pull it off. I had to punch into the 4K and pull shots from every section of the frame to create new shots that didn't look like jump cuts galore. The irony is that if they had stuck around, I would never have used the mirroring effect and it wouldn't have been quite as psychedelic in nature.
In spite of all these challenges, I was able to finish the video and premiere it at Downtown Artwalk on March 10th. I was rendering my FX shots out of After Effects up until a couple hours before the screening. They have a great playback system, btw. I was able to take a ProRes 4444 file directly of my workstation output and play it back on their RAID system. The colors and brightness looked almost the same as it did on my HD monitors. It was an enormous learning experience for me and I look forward to my next project, be it a music video or feature film. So without further ado, here is the video:
I'm going to qualify the making of my video with a few anecdotes, since I know you guys are very technical knowledgable and experienced. I had been shooting since 2006 on the Panasonic HVX-200, but this was my first experience directing on the Red and it was on a sub $5K budget so outside of the shoot, I had to do almost everything myself. I'm a director and sound designer by trade, not a cinematographer or visual FX artist. I also didn't have a budget or time to do proper color correction and noise reduction before I left the country two weeks ago. I may go back and address those issues when I am back in the US. And lastly, I gave myself a crash course in After Effects and particle generators, which I had no experience with before a couple months ago. This is the first page from the storyboard I illustrated.
"The Wise" is written and performed by L.A.-based electronic musician Zaptra. I met him in a small close-knit experimental electronic scene. It's not your garden variety electronic club music. It's a bit more mysterious and unpredictable. I came up with the entire story and concept of the video, which involves a sorcerer summoning creatures performed by professional dancers. I chose to shoot this video on the Red because we were going to be using practical candle light in-scene and shooting with a lot of bright red colors, which had the potential to bleed on a lesser camera.
Because we went over time on our first setup, the dancers left after only 30 minutes of shooting. Thus, I had literally 10 minutes of useable footage from one master angle, so I had to get very creative to make it work. Honestly, I didn't know how I was going to pull it off. I had to punch into the 4K and pull shots from every section of the frame to create new shots that didn't look like jump cuts galore. The irony is that if they had stuck around, I would never have used the mirroring effect and it wouldn't have been quite as psychedelic in nature.
In spite of all these challenges, I was able to finish the video and premiere it at Downtown Artwalk on March 10th. I was rendering my FX shots out of After Effects up until a couple hours before the screening. They have a great playback system, btw. I was able to take a ProRes 4444 file directly of my workstation output and play it back on their RAID system. The colors and brightness looked almost the same as it did on my HD monitors. It was an enormous learning experience for me and I look forward to my next project, be it a music video or feature film. So without further ado, here is the video: