Music Video -Case Study

It was a thrill while it lasted, a familiar terrain for me, low budget with all the worries that come with it, after a few weeks of deliberating planning and re-planning I put up a crew to actualise the aim of bringing the visuals to the big/small screen.

PRE PRODUCTION

With no named budget to the shoot, I knew it was going to be a challenging yet rewarding one, we had to revisit the script a number of times till we got around a number of issues, which meant watering down the story. A pity.

As we've always done with low budget and personal projects, we rally round friends, the major issues were locations, costume and styling those factors were out of the control of the studio. We had trashed the script down to the barest essentials -no more luxurious locations and the usual extravagance that marks today's music videos, we decided on 2 locations. First, an exotic beach somewhere away from town where we have our privacy, away from the interference of normal beach crowd; second, a penthouse or roof of a lounge, we were lucky with the former but the later was a bit of challenge so we went for a roof around the artiste's neighbourhood, with proper camera angle we were able to pull it off.

PRODUCTION

We set of with a minimal sized crew, it was a long drive from town but it was worth it, we got to the beach somewhere close to La Campaign Tropicana and set off on another endurance journey with cast, equipment and crew member. It was a basic setup, within 30minutes makeup, styling and set up we were ready to shoot. We had fun with the elements. It went wonderfully well, by sun down it was a wrap.

Shot on a Blackmagic Cinema Camera with Canon 50mm prime, Tamron 24-135mm and Canon 70-200mm with x2 extender (love the added softness), a drone didn't work out this time around. Production still shot on a Canon 5D MKII and Canon Rebel.

POST PRODUCTION

Shooting RAW Cinema DNG gave me the freedom of pushing my grades a little further in post, the shoot took place on a hazy harmattan afternoon which added a little to the greying out of the flat profile straight from the camera. The usual round tripping from Davinci Resolve to Adobe Premiere back to Resolve helped not just in having a smooth edit and colour workflow but also helped me save time as I was working with pretty heavy files.

My typical colour workflow, basic grade of the flat profile then I applied one of my favourite 3D LUT, isolated specific parts further and pushed the grades some more. Easier said than done, that amounted into 52 hours in edit and colour grading, off course I played around with a number of looks before settling for the final look.

I fired out my XD ProRes render and back to Premier where I added my tittles and effects shot from Aftereffect, nothing fancy just graphics, finished off with additional sound and voila! video rendered and delivered.

Pushing the grades

Enjoy the music video we shot with next to nothing, Goodlove by Ebzy Lese.