The Pitch or Pitching is the process of putting together a document that demonstrates your idea to the band / artist or their management.  This is an important step in the process. This document needs to wow them, or at the least sell them that you’re going to shoot a video that will work for their song. Often I’ll be pitching against 5 or 6 other directors – it’s competitive!  My pitch document is generally a 3 – 4 page PDF. I try to keep the text brief, to the point and emotive.

I always try and to make this as visual as possible. Lots of large photos that represent how you want to shoot the video, the colours & the feel. Think of it as a ‘moodboard’ or a ‘Pinterest’ page for your idea. Google images is your best friend for this. I’ll usually spend a couple of hours finding relevant images to convey my idea.

Use lots of large photos that convey style, colour and feel.

Keep the text short and simple. Let the collection of images speak for themselves.

Polystyrene Sheet

I did some work with renowned photographer Sue Bryce and she’s a big advocate of natural light shooting – and her results are extraordinary.  She uses giant (2.4 x 1.2 metre) polystyrene sheets to bounce sunlight onto her subjects.

The problem for us is polystyrene is useless outside in the wind – we actually used 1 on an outdoor shoot once and it came home in parts.  But for $20 – $40 a sheet it can’t be beaten for price – most large hardware stores stock them.  They are perfect for indoor use.

Collapsible Reflector

If you’ve ever used a traditional collapsible reflector (often called “flickies”) then you know how floppy they become in the wind, especially if you use the hard reflection side. A gentle breeze causes the light to ripple and flicker, and a strong wind make them fold into a potato chip shape. After an insanely windy shoot where i was trying to use my whole body to keep the reflector from folding up, I vowed to buy “the best reflector money can buy.”

HALOGEN WORK LIGHTS

When it comes down to it, light is light. If you can get a nice rendering of light where you want it, the viewer will never know what source you used or how much it cost. A popular student/guerilla solution is to use cheap “work lights” from a hardware store. They are crazy hot and gulp the power, but if you work them carefully (bouncing is a great idea as it bounces the light, not the heat) then you can get incredible results. Recently, the price gap between “ghetto” and “indy” has narrowed with Chinese tungsten fresnels. For not much more money, you can look a lot more “legit” on set.

TUNGSTEN

When it comes to price and the quality of light, it is hard to beat a tungsten fixture. They are inexpensive compared to other sources and unlike pretty much every other lighting technology, they produce every hue of visible light without gaps. Tungsten lights are heavy around 3200k, which is quite orange/warm and you’ll lose up to half the light output when gelling to match daylight. They require care to not overload circuits and can also be extremely hot and cause sweating and visible discomfort to the people you are filming. If you can work around this, they cannot be beat for the money.

As we had been shooting with the sunset as a backlight, it made sense to create a similar feeling for the night shoot. I placed the 575w HMI fresnel as far to the back right as I could go without it being in our wide shot. As the light was physically much closer to the piano, I aimed it more towards the drummer so that all the band members would get a similar amount of rim. A 150w HMI close on the front left acted as key and a second 150w 12 or so meters from the front of the band on the right filled in some of the face shadows without making it too flat. The backlight and key I kept fairly low to match the low angle of the setting sun, with the fill coming from much higher to give a more flattering modeling on the faces. 

SEVEN JIB COMPACT XL

Logan called to put my seven jib (I LOVE my 7, it’s SO fast to setup) on the back of a truck, which is a safety concern and generally a bad idea for vibrations. I bolted a short Matthews bazooka through the truck bed and kept a hand on the base to try to dampen jiggles (and let me know if the rig started to fail). We used an image stabilized lens, which helped quite a bit, but couldn’t catch all the vibrations. On set, I was unhappy with the remaining jiggle, but some warp stabilization really knocked it back and left a rather stunning shot. The road was a dead end with no traffic and everyone was safety briefed and alert. Even still, you should use extreme caution if you attempt something like this.

MATTHEWS MASTER MOUNT

I try to anticipate the director, so when we rigged up the jib, I threw my Matthews Master Mount car rig into the back of the truck. The suction cup mount requires a stable surface to mount to, but the wee car had really flimsy and loose panels. The Master Mount comes with multiple suction cups to triangulate with, but my experience is that they don’t work well with DSLRs (whose lens mount and shoe are notoriously “floppy”). As time was precious, we popped a head onto the mount, vacuumed the mount to the car and sent it down the road to test. I was, as I expected, unhappy with the vibrations, but Logan felt he could stabilize it, so maybe 5 minutes from unpacking the mount, we had the two shots he wanted.

Having a loud playback setup on set is crucial for a good performance from the band or artist.  Having the music loud helps them get more into their performance and they become less self-conscious about playing along in front of the camera and crew.  I often just use one of the band members guitar amps.  You’ll need a guitar cable with a converter down to a 3.5mm mini jack for an mp3 player.

Any MP3 player will work in this setup.  Using your phone is not always convenient - especially if you’ve got people ringing.  But for this video I used my shitty old iPhone plugged into a guitar amp.  For the piano performance I was even able to use the phones built in speakers – as the sun was going down and the amp wasn’t setup yet.  Luckily the piano is fake and makes no noise.  See the clip below.

I shot on the mk3 for this video – but I’d be happy shooting on any of the Canon, Nikon, Lumix or Sony DSLR’s or mirrorless cameras with HD video.

The advantage the mk3 has over cheaper cameras is the low light capabilities and full frame look. I was able to shoot right up until the sun disappeared without any extra light.

I usually shoot on the Canon EF 50mm f1.8 but I dropped it a few days before the shoot. Luckily I was able to borrow a Nikon f1.4 which has a beautiful shllow depth of field and I shot most of the footage wide open to take advantage of that.

It does however take a bit to get used to the reverse rotation of the focus ring. About 85% of the video was shot on this lens.

The 24-105mm f4 is not the fastest lens but for the wide angle shots I usually like to shoot with the iris shut down to f8 or higher.  This lens was used for the wide shot of the band performance during daylight.

This is not a cheap lens but it really does deliver suburp images and has a really good zoom range. The image stabilization means that you can use it handheld as we did in this shoot.  Andrew shot a lot of B camera with this lens – he was able to sit back and not get in the way of the A camera – but still get some nice tight shots.

In order to get the most out of your Canon DSLR image I feel it’s best to install a picture profile onto the camera.  The right Picture Profile will increase your dynamic range and help you obtain desired looks in post.  The profile that I went for is called ‘CinePlus Lightform’ and costs $19.  It’s designed so that the image off the camera is useable without any need for grading.  And I do have to say it works.  The master video files look great and if I was in a hurry they could easily be good enough for the final video.  The strongest part of the CinePlus picture profile is that it seems to maintain skin tones.

› Find out more and purchase

› Learn how to install a picture profile here

I was a Final Cut Pro user – but the new Final Cut X required I upgraded my Mac.  So instead I switched to Adobe Creative Cloud and bought a cheap PC with plenty of RAM and a good graphics card ($700).  Subscribing to the cloud for $40 AUD a month means I have access to all the Adobe suite including:  After Effects, Encore, Audition, Photoshop, Lightroom & Premiere to name a few.  I feel it’s good value for money and the integration between all of them makes the process a lot faster.  As for editing a music video – I’d happily cut on any editing software.  The one thing I do use a lot in Premiere and After Effects is the camera stabilization.  It’s generally a 1 click plugin and was great in this video for taking all the jitter out of the jib arm shots.

› Adobe Creative Cloud homepage