Monday, May 3, 2010

Eric G "Riding WIth You" Music Video Shoot

Three weeks ago, I was the DP for a christian R&B music video. The artist was singer, Eric G. The treatment was co-written/directed by Dan Norton and I and this project was intended for Dan's final project in his Production II and Editing classes in SVA.

We initially had two months to plan for this thing, but we both became massively busy and Dan had some important family matters to deal with, so we didn't really start getting cracking on the pre-production until a week or two before the shoot. We had about 3 or 4 meetings asside from our private brainstorm sessions.

Either way everything got changed on the night before the shoot due to many factors. We stayed up all night making sure everything was atleast 90-100% good before shooting. We shot for an entire weekend on barely any sleep.

We shot on the Panasonic HMC150, which I have to say is an awesome little camera. I loved using it with the SG Blade 35mm adapter and Nikon AI-S primes. We got some gorgeous footage.

We ended up running into a few problems during production. First, we were kicked out of almost every other location but luckily, Dan and I planned for this in advance and we were prepared to search for secondary locations. Also, we planned to shoot a concert scene where the main character goes to an Eric G concert. The problem was that SVA couldn't give us more than a three unit Arri package so we were hoping that our friend, Randy, who is the AV tech at crossbridge church would lend us some PAR cans to light the small venue. It turned out he was extrememly sick that weekend and not to mention he didnt have the lights in his posession. We ended up working with what we had and the footage didn't come out bad but, it would have been so much better if I had the gear I needed. My strategy at that point was to shoot as tight as possible using our 100mm lens. That gave us some room to move lights around for different shots. It was a pain in the butt but it worked out.

I think the best part of the shoot was getting to play with a Fuji Instax camera which prints little polaroids (which are now called instant film :P) Check it out:



A rough cut is finished and Dan is conducting minor tweeks to the edit so it should be posted online in about a week. Below are a few performance stills that a grabbed using my camera phone. Sorry that they're a bit low quality (LG Dare :(


(Don't worry, that's not interlacing!)




You can check out Eric G's music on his website at ericgsounds.com

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