My fourth collaboration with fellow Northwestern Director, The James Kapner (C05), was a landmark one. Since completing our first video together in February of 2008
The song is for a hip-hop duo, D-Wirks, which consists of producer extraordinaire, Beewirks and the lyrical, D-Schwartz. This is their first single and title track off their new EP, “Foot on the Gas.”
WARNING: this has a brief scene with nudity and drug use, so it is NSFW or children…
The bulk of the video was shot January 16, 2010 at The James’s mother’s house in Canoga Park. The valley was the ideal setting for this Boogie Nights inspired New Year’s Eve party and the price of the location was perfect. Wendy was also delighted to have us and was a wonderful host. In fact, she put in lots of time helping with set decoration and producorial duties making her an invaluable part of the team. Thanks again, Wendy!
We filmed the LA portion with the EX1 provided by our wonderful 2nd AC/tech, Mica Correia. I have grown so accustom to shooting with the HVX-200 with the Letus Extreme adaptor and the RED-One that it was such a relief to work with such a light sensitive camera! It took a few set-ups for my eyes to adjust and realize that we had enough light to shoot, with the glaring exception of the car driving off at the end–more on that later. Yes, it was a little strange having so much of the world in focus, but I was very happy with the overall look the camera yielded. We were looking to capture (in a subtle way) the feel of a pornographic video, so the “film look” wasn’t a concern. As a bonus, it made my beloved 1st AC, Cameron Shaw, have to worry much less about her pulls! In fact, I could ramble on for hours about how much I loathe the Letus, but I’ll save that for another post.
In what seems to be a theme for The James and I, we shot most of the video at 48FPS. After all, there was no film stock to concern ourselves with, so we preferred having the slow motion option and when sped up, we welcomed the slightly narrower shutter effect. The only downside is the EX (and HVXs) resolution cap at 720p for slow motion. We ceded defeat and planned to master at 720. Because of the lack of performance, there was little reason to shoot at 24FPS and move back and forth between 720 and 1080 (as we had done with “Throw Them Staxxx“).
We were lucky to have the great Brad Grimmett come out and do some steadicam for us. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I haven’t worked with steadicam in well over a year (probably closer to two, but I don’t even want to check). These last bunch of shows have been so hand held-centric, that nobody wanted to bother with the expense. That is not to say that I haven’t been forced to attempt steadicam-esque shots, but it was certainly a relief knowing Brad would get the shot we all saw in our heads. We did a fair share of takes on the introductory shot of Herschel walking in, as well as the long end shot. I know Brad wasn’t super pleased we chopped his long takes up so much, it is kind of to be expected with music video pacing.
Speaking of the final shot, that was not something I was excited to do. We had originally talked about shooting it at magic hour as the sun was rising so we would be able to have some ambient light to expose things better, but that would’ve meant wrapping closer to 18 hours on what was already going to be at least 16…
Leave a reply