McAlister Kemp - "Hell Yeah" Music Video

We had two shoot days for the "Hell Yeah" music video. One for the main performance shots and the second for the narrative element of the clip. The track is a great party anthem and we really wanted to capture the band giving a great performance that was quite inclusive of the audience. The video culminates with the boys getting some of the crowd to join them up on stage for the last chorus and has a great energy to it. Nick DeLaine & Jay MacNeill put together a great lighting package for us that absolutely took it to another level on the day. We shot this clip with the Canon DSLRs again and find that we get through quite a few more setups using these cameras without compromising on the look that we want. I was shooting off the dolly track with my 7D Zacuto cage rig that's setup for studio style shooting with follow focus and rear rods for mounting an SDI splitter box and also a Marshall Monitor on a Zamerican arm. My lenses of choice were the Canon 16-35 zoom and the Zeiss 50mm 1.4. Rob was going mostly hand held with the Canon 70-200 and also off a mini jib for some shots.

Rob mounted a 5D with 16-35 Canon lens to the hood of a car for the driving shots which we really enjoyed getting. The interior was lit with an LED light panel gaffer taped to the dash... in hindsight we probably could've used another light panel to get them both lit properly on that car interior. There was also one or two visual FX shots in this one. The scene where the couple enter the bar actually had no neon sign there. I added it in post to just sell the shot a bit more. They were actually entering a shoe shop and that's just not very rock n roll is it? I did it in Motion 4 and brought in a still image of a neon sign and added some glow to it with some keyframe animation on the intensity of the glow and also motion tracked it to another sign in the background that I blacked out. The end result just gave a bit more authenticity to the idea that they were entering a live music venue.

The music video for the Steve Forde track “Hurricane” was a classic rockin’ performance video. We got a fantastic location of the old Eveleigh train sheds in Sydney. It has a great gritty feel to it which was really suited to the style of clip Steve wanted to make. The band were awesome and kept the energy up take after take and as you can see from the behind the scenes video Dave Robinson had to double time it on the drums a few times so we could get some slow motion footage of him playing to the song. In order to do that and have it sync up perfectly with the original track, we have to make a version of the song that runs at exactly double the speed. Then we roll the cameras to record twice as many frames per second as normal. So we run them at 50 frames per second and then slow it down in post production so it plays back at 25 frames and this gives a nicer, cleaner slow motion than simply slowing down regular speed footage.

We shot the clip with Canon EOS cameras and a mix of Canon and Zeiss glass. The small size of these cams allowed us to easily mount overhead shots on a c-stand and get some different angles that way. The shoot was mostly off sticks with a few shots from the Kessler Pocket Dolly. The main rig that I used was my Zacuto Z-Cage which I have customized a little with rear extension rods to allow for my HDMI-SDI converter box and also to mount the Marshall field monitor. The Z-Cage has handles all round which I love for carrying it around from setup to setup and also for added stability when doing whip pans or any camera movement in general. Thanks to our crew and cast for another enjoyable shoot.

Harmony James - Good Enough

For Harmony James’ track “Good Enough” we ventured out to Luddenham in western Sydney to a fantastic location. It was a cottage that was over a century old. We used minimal lighting on this clip with a single light source outside the window providing a natural looking glow in the room where Harmony would perform. The cameras we used on this were the Canon EOS 5D, 7D and 550D with a combo of Zeiss and Canon L glass. Shooting in the house provided some great textures on the old walls and floor and also a beautiful ambient light, but the rickety floor boards and creaky structure meant that we couldn’t lug too much gear into there so it was great shooting with a light camera setup on this one.
The other location was the horse stud where we got some nice coverage of Harmony riding the horse at dusk. We used a jib and also the Kessler pocket dolly to get some of the camera movement out in the field and the Zacuto shoulder rig for the handheld shots. It was quite bright out there and the Z-finder came in very handy to help get us a decent exposure when operating off the shoulder. The music video was edited and graded by Muy Lang Linda Ung at LitUp Digital.