Group Meeting w/ Damian Suparasiri, Robert Cooper & Ross Carter – Music Video

Had a group meeting with the whole crew involved with the making of the upcoming music video for the band; Cheating Jack Ketch.

Conversation w/ Damian

I had a long discussion with Damian about the visual style that he was hoping to achieve for the music video, he showed me a couple of music videos that he really liked the visual style of and was hoping to create something along the lines;

Cancer Bats – French Immersion

For me this music video seemed to be rather a simple black and white approach but cut with some scenes with very high black contrasts; there are a couple of shots where some shadows are very prominent and these to me are the most interesting shots; looking forward to the shoot I think this style will really rely on the band themselves wearing the right colours for the shoot day to achieve this style though I’m much interested in looking at working with shadows as an idea for the music video from a cinematographers viewpoint.

Tyler the Creator – Yonkers

This video was really stand out for me; as it had the same bright white background that we would have whilst shooting in the infinity cove and also the use of a tilt-shift lens in this music video reminded me that I have a Lens Baby Composer in my own set of lenses that can achieve a similar effect by blurring different areas of the image that you are filming and I’ve yet to use it on any film work to this date, and this video really got me thinking that this music video could be the prefect opportunity to experiment with the lens itself.

Conversation w/ Rob

I discussed with Rob what the equipment we were going to need to use in terms of lighting for the music video; after our lighting workshop from a couple of weeks previous where we tested out the LED lights, we both agreed that those lights wouldn’t be appropriate for the lighting style we were looking to achieve.

We agreed that the small Dedo lighting kit would be the best option for the shoot and that if we went for a 3 light set up we could look to explore with the idea of creating interesting shadows that would be projected on the back of the infinity cove and would give us the stylistic vision that Damian had wanted for the music video. We talked in depth about how the finished video would look like and from that Rob said that he would work on a lighting plan for the video so that everything would be ready for our shoot day, and to help with this we as a group decided that a test shoot prior to the actual shoot day of the video would be a great idea.

Conversation w/ Ross

I discussed with Ross which lenses that we were going to use; we as a group had already agreed that we were going to shoot the video on our Canon 550D’s as we all each have own; we also decided that it would be a good idea to book out a Canon 5D MKII from the ERC as it might come in handy for some of the shots in the music video.

In the interest of making this music video look as professional as possible we decided that it was best to book out a wide range of the Carl Zeiss lenses from the ERC as well; Ross also asked about using my Lensbaby Composer for the shoot as he wanted to look into camera movement etc. And he had the same reaction to me after watching the Tyler the Creator music video with the use of the tilt shift. We agreed that though he had not used the lens before that it would be a good experiment for his RED project even if it didn’t end up using those shots in the final version of the music video.