If you’re following me here, or here then you may have seen some of this work come out last week. About a month ago I shot this campaign in North Melbourne in a little abandoned parking lot. I was really happy with the outcome, and we’ve had some great feedback already from the stills and video.
Here’s the video:
And some stills:
Instead of just using this post as a ‘here it is’, I thought I’d explain more of the process and gear specs used in the shoot. The whole thing was shot on the Canon 1D mark4 which is a demon of a camera. I used plenty of primes throughout the shoot – 24 F1.4, 50 F1.2, 135 F2 which play an integral role in unbelievably sharp shots, and great tools for video. Being a fixed length, it really helps when framing up shots – you either move back, forward, up or down to get the framing, so it simplifies it greatly. Most of the day was shot at ISO 400 because it was quite overcast – on the 1D at 400 is pretty clean anyway, so a lot of grit was applied in post.
As for the processing there was a lot of dodging and burning applied to the still shots to get a gritty feel. We really wanted some texture, and after the sun failed to pop it’s head out during the shoot we had to re-think how to get that ‘grit’. Enter black and white conversions, and punchy oversharp looking images.
See the following for a bit of a rundown into the post work done on the ‘hero’ shot:
Here’s the basic shot with a tiny bit of processing done out of Capture One. Pretty flat and ready to go in TIFF 16bit Adobe RGB.
Add a bit of dodge and burn around the shadows and highlights. Bring out a bit of texture in the ground. Throw a bit of curves in the mix too.
High pass filter ready to roll if you’re looking at a colour output.
Channel mixer black and white, because this shot was rolling out as a B&W. Tweaked curves again, and ready to go. Shot done.
Ok, now onto the video… being one of the first videos I’ve directed, shot and edited, I knew exactly how/what needed to be shot for a decent storyline. It was one of those briefs that gave me freedom and creativity to produce what I thought was a representation of ‘anarchy’. We casted ‘real’ talent which gave a great look, and they all responded amazingly to direction for first timers. Again, everything was shot on the 1D at 60fps because the end product was only ever going to be 720p anyway. I shot to produce slow mo for most of the edit – I knew I wanted everything to feel unlike the ‘normal’ world, so things tend to look cool when they’re really slow. The 1D got us to nearly 2.5 times slower than output speed, so I used after effects and premiere to slow the footage even further, which has worked pretty well. Next time I try to slow footage further than 60fps, I will try the Twixtor plugin, which may stop any artefacts occurring in some of the frames… I’ve heard really great reviews. The colour grade was done inside premiere which was a whole lot of time just tweaking and playing to get the right feel.
Has this been helpful at all? If there’s anything else you folks want to hear about – please let me know. This was really fun project and I’m so happy to end result has been getting great reviews.
Thanks again goes to the boys from Mary of the Moon for licensing us their song that fits perfectly with the footage – Basterfield. Hit up their facebook page and follow the Melbourne lads!
