Update: remembered I did shoot a tiny bit on the behind the scenes DoP Diary cam.
I was asked to shoot this music video for bluesy / Americana band Kill It Kid based on a recommendation by director Tarquin Glass.  The producer and director both do work for the internationally-sold TV show Live from Abbey Road, which has had some fantastic cinematography, so it was very flattering to be asked.
I’d just come off two days steadicam work on a music video for Texture Films, which happened to be using the same RED camera kit from the always-helpful Johnny at Camera Speed, so I just about managed to pack the whole lot into my car and headed down to Bath for the shoot, along with focus puller Jason Cuddy.
We got extraordinarily lucky with the weather and shot a fair bit in probably the most gorgeous sunset / magic hour I’ve ever seen on the very top of a huge old theatre in the middle of town. ¬†Did plenty of slow motion ‘hair twirly’ shots with the RED at 120fps, with the sun straight into camera for some beautiful lens flares on the Super Speed MkIIIs. ¬†Irritatingly, the RED doesn’t like having the sun itself in the frame and shows it as a black spot which whilst it can be fixed in post, worries me on low budget shoots like this (I assume they’ll never get around to it), so I framed out as best as I could.
We also shot a performance of the track all the way through with the full band just after sunset. ¬†This was done with the camera set to 50fps for a half speed slow motion effect, but the track being played back to the band in reality was played at twice normal speed. ¬†This usually makes musicians piss themselves laughing when they first try and mime along with every beat happening in half the time they’re used to, but the end result is a lovely ethereally-smooth performance which still syncs up on screen to the track played normally.
Once we were in complete darkness we moved to another roof space for the main performance which due to a limited lighting budget I lit with a couple of 2k tungsten fresnels gelled 1/2 CTB as three-quarter backlights, with a handful of 1k tungsten fresnels with a little half diffusion on the barn doors as cross lights, then two 4 foot 4 bank KinoFlos with full diffusion as a soft frontal fill.  Exposure on the lens ended up about T/2-2.8 split (I desperately try and avoid shooting the Super Speeds wide open at T/1.3 as they look horrendously soft), with the 2k backlights playing at about T/4 so roughly a stop over key.
We had a fairly natty little IndieDolly style track which I thought the weight of the full RED setup with heavy duty sticks and O’Connor head would crush, but actually for some fast and loose takes on the 18mm, it was absolutely fine.
We hosed down the whole roof area we shot on for this section to get a bit of reflection action going, but the available rigging points for lighting kinda got in the way of anything really spectacular on that front, and the floor was too broken up and gritty to allow for any clean reflections of the band.
The last section of the video was shot inside the various nooks and crannies of the theatre’s attics and rigging areas, which was a fantastic location I wished we could have spent more time in. ¬†Limited at this point with basically no electricians left I had to deploy the 1 and 2k fresnels as best as possible – we wanted some deep blue light for one shot which ate up a massive amount of the light so had to go to 640 on the ISO which I hate; but hey, it’s a music video!
Johnny from Camera Speed ended up turning up himself to pick up the camera kit to take it straight to a job the next morning, so we benefited from a very speedy derig. ¬†Good thing too, by the time the focus puller and I got back to the hotel, we’d been going for 23 hours solid.
Video currently in post, will stick up some screen caps and the final thing when I see it myself.
(All photos in post courtesy of stills photographer, haven’t got round to extracting stills from the RED footage yet)
