Cinematography Breakdown - Pop Tart Music Video - 1st Setup
Earlier this year I got together with a few friends and used a (very rare) free weekend to make a video for the Musicbed Challenge. I’d been busy with work and hadn’t felt like I’d done anything to really express my own creativity in some time so I viewed this contest as a chance to hold myself to the fire and make something for myself. While there are parts that I would change about the finished video now, I’m still really pleased with the final looks I achieved in a day with only about two days of pre-production and all costs coming out of my own wallet.
The way the challenge works is that you’re given multiple choices of music available from the Musicbed’s library and you must use one of those songs to create a video specific to the category you’re entering. I decided to go with a music video and landed on the song “Poptart” by Margolnick. Once I landed on the song I started to draft up ideas. Honestly one of the first ones that came to mind was what I went with in the end: an obsessive stalker kidnapping someone they’re in love with. The whole idea came from the cover of the album and this figure standing with their back to us in a red raincoat.
So with that idea in mind I started grabbing reference stills that helped me focus on the tone and look I wanted to achieve.
Reference stills aren’t always about replicating the looks of what you’re pulling, either. Sometimes it’s worth having stills that hit you personally with a certain tone or mood, and can then be used to put you back into that mental place when you’re on set and having trouble remembering your inspiration and feelings to aim for. Pull anything that inspires you and achieves the same tone, look or atmosphere you hope to hit.
I knew due to this being a very last-minute project that access to locations would be pretty limited, so I wrote the story around being able to shoot in a small digital studio we use at times and the rest taking place at my own home where I had complete control over all the other aspects/availability. I also wanted to practice more control in my shots (I love going handheld but rely on it too often), so I chose to use a tripod as often as possible for this particular shoot. I wanted framing to matter, and movement to matter when it happened - not just have it be chaotic.
Most importantly I just wanted to challenge myself to practice something I don’t usually do.
We started the day at the digital studio. Once we wrapped there we’d head to my house where we’d be for the rest of the day. I had an idea for a jungle-like atmosphere with bright neon colors as a representation for the mental hideaway of the captive. It wouldn’t be easy to do that on a budget but what I finally landed on was going to a Hobby Lobby, buying about 150$ worth of fake vines/flowers, and throwing them all onto C-stands around the talent.
The best part of this to be really honest was being able to return the vines later on so that I hadn’t spent any actual money on suddenly owning like 20 strands of plastic vines. It’s not the best method for approaching every video you shoot, but sometimes it’s a good corner that you can cut that helps add additional production quality to a given look.
Studio Setup
The entire video was shot 4k, Clog 3. While I knew I wanted to shoot as much as possible on a tripod, I also wanted the option to add movement in post, which I did a lot. I would’ve liked to have been able to pump more haze into this location but due to circumstances outside of my control, I couldn’t pump any sort of atmosphere into that space — so I did the next best thing: using pro-mist filters. Since we have two c300’s at work, and each has their own filter kit, I just doubled up and put both of our 1/4 Pro-Mists into the same filter since we’d only be using one of the Canons that day.
Thanks to framing, the backlight (Digital Sputnik ds-1, full red, on a Matthews stand) was obscured by the talent and the vines. This allowed a nice bloom right into the middle of the frame, and a night symmetrical hair light.
The Skypanel (seriously the best light ever) was a teal color, with full diffusion inside of a chimera. We added a grid over the softbox to control the spread of light, and shot it down onto the talent from the left of camera. Keeping the light to where it hit only where we wanted it to was pivotal if we were going to keep the small space falling off into darkness around the vines and talent, and using a grid+softbox allowed this.
Once these two things were set, we were done with the setup and just rolled the song over and over and over again until I felt I had enough takes. The only changes made were slowly adding elements to the talent that made it clear his space was slowly being invaded (ropes, and eventually the female talent). I kept the camera locked the entire time, and on the same lens, shooting at 4k. My AD also ran a 4k Black Magic Pocket at times throughout the day which got me a lot of additional coverage and was very cool to have to play with. If a shot is shaky in the final video, there’s a good chance it was one of his handheld shots with the Pocket cam.
So that’s it for setup 1 of the day. I’ll dig into the other half of the day in another post sometime! Let me know if you have any questions at all, or comments, feedback, etc. I’d love to hear it. Thanks for reading.