Thursday 25 November 2010

Ready To Feel The Sunshine

The b-roll shoot* took place for a music video last night - the song is "2007" by Tenderstar and the video will feature two members of the band. We turned a local community hall into a bluescreen studio for the project, which will combine live footage and CGI, and the treatment includes a number of effect challenges including teleportation, artificial mirror shots and a weightless scene. This is my second music video project - I previously made an animated video for David Novan's composition Soupremacy.

The shoot was successful in that we covered all the material in about three hours (plus an hour to set up.) The dolly performed OK but there's still some wobble over the joints even though the tracks were taped into place: as it should only affect 5-10 frames of action in each shot I'll be able to correct this by hand in the video sequence editor.

James Cameron dreams of a high tech studio set-up like mine.

Oops - accidentally included one of Roland Emmerich's photos from the making of "The Day After Tomorrow" there. My bad.

Tim Burton's version of "The Commitments" will be a re-imagining and not just a re-make.

Learning points:

Lighting: always check your lights - that way you won't set up a new floodlight only to find it has a faulty transformer and blows every bulb you put in.

Direction: This is important although I'm sure it's obvious to anyone more experienced. "Turn away, move your arms like this, step back" doesn't help the actors. "There's an explosion coming from this corner, so cover your eyes and turn away from the blast" is the way to go. Don't treat them as robots, give them a situation or an idea and trust them to create a response.

*Performance roll - the band performing the song. B-roll - interpretative footage or any other footage used in a music video.

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