James - Recut

Liked the James video I did with those lovely Hope & Social fellas? Not enough edits for your liking, you say? Didn’t think were enough extreme bass closeups? More fairy lights? Well then, how would you like to cut your own version?

We thought it might be fun to release the unedited footage from the shoot to the public at large. You are a talented bunch, we would love to see what you can do. Go crazy, anything goes (mostly). Cut it, post it to your favourite video sharing site and tell us and the rest of the world about it.

There are two files you can download.

James-ReCut.zip (torrent) - ~1GB

This file contains the 4 main takes I used in the final cut. Takes 1 & 3 are continuous and run the length of the song. Takes 2 & 4 contain gaps. Also in this file is the retimed audio. I have tried to approximately line up the takes with the audio such that if you drop one on a timeline so it starts at the same time as the audio, they will be roughly in sync. I say roughly, because there was no playback during shooting (see previous post), it is not perfect all the time. Once you have the clips in a cut, you may have to slip and slide a bit to get it right. I did.

James-ReCut-Extras.zip (torrent)- ~800MB (Optional)

This file contains additional footage that was shot on the day and found its way into the final cut. There are some quite long clips in here, that maybe 10 frames of which was actually used. More options for you.

A couple of things…

• The video files are Quicktime PhotoJPEG at 1280x720 25fps. These files should be edit ready in any editing software that supports Quicktime. I haven’t extensively tested this, so let me know if you have any problems. I know this is a slightly odd codec choice, so if anyone has any other suggestions for universally supported edit ready formats, please let me know.
• While we are putting this out there for you to do what you like with, please respect the work of others. Firstly, do not claim your video as being entirely your own. ‘Hope & Social - James by John Doe’ is not cool, ‘Hope & Social - James Recut by John Doe’ is much better and an ‘Original by Ross McWhannell’ would be appreciated somewhere in the description. Secondly, you can feel free to mix in any other material when cutting your video but you must have the right to use it. For legal purposes this project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

Go forth, cut!

Hope & Social - James

Director, Cinematographer, Editor, Colourist: Ross McWhannell

A somewhat spontaneous series of events led to me directing my first music video. A series of events that is testament to the truth that where there is a will, there is a way. And when you have friends, and friends of friends, a community of people willing to help make something happen if you will, anything is possible.

I was on holiday, back in the UK visiting family and friends. Sometime before the trip I had suggested to the Hope & Social boys that while I am back it might be fun to try and shoot something; I had recently picked up a Canon 5DmkII and, while it was predominately for stills, I was obviously very keen to put its video credentials to the test. A few ideas flew around in the time leading up to the trip but nothing really came of them. I had planned to spend a few days in Leeds anyway and hoped to catch up with the guys and maybe we could work something out. The band were in the process of finishing their new album and I hadn’t really heard any of it even by the time I got to Leeds. By this point though it started to look like something might happen, they were due to be rehearsing in their studio/rehearsal space ‘The Crypt’ on the Friday. The email chain started again, it was the Tuesday before.

So we had very little time, almost no money and I had practically no equipment. Luckily the guys from the band know some pretty cool people. People like Barnaby Aldrick and the guys from 3B Media, who offered the use of any of their gear I might need and people like Ben Denison who I never actually met in person but behind the scenes along with guitarist Rich Huxley provided the glue that seemed to bring it together.

Wednesday, and I finally got to hear the album. I needed to pick a song and come up with an idea that not only fitted but could also be shot by a crew of one in a couple of hours. James stood out. I remember listening to it and seeing lots of instrument closeups rapidly cut together. The song was full of energy, the video needed to be too and erratic, dirty and rough. Of course, this would be pretty full on to do continuously for the full 4 minutes of the song, so it became clear that the verses should have little or no editing. By giving the viewer a break from this sensory assault, we would give them a chance to pay attention to the lyrics and not lose the impact of the kinesis of the rest of the song. The choruses, while rapidly cut, would also be differentiated by allowing full head shots of the band. Finally, at no point should we reveal the space; wide shots were out and constantly shifting shallow depth of field was in. I wanted to use this sense of claustrophobia to turn the intensity up just a little bit more.

At the back of my mind when coming up with the concept was the camera kit I had, and it became apparent that I could exploit two of the 5DmkII’s greatest strengths: it’s physical size and it’s huge sensor. Having such small footprint would allow me to get the camera right in there with band while they played, and I mean right in there, you can operate this thing with one hand around a corner if necessary! In order to achieve the instrument close ups I required it was clear I needed a macro lens and luckily Barnaby was able to step up with a loan of a Canon 100mm EF Macro. This combined with the VistaVision sized sensor meant I could get a remarkably shallow depth of field. That said, while I did want the image to continuously shift in and out of focus, I didn’t want to push it too far. The plan was to aim for f4, to give myself half a chance of getting something in focus some of the time. Shooting at the macro end of a 100mm leaves you with literally millimeters of DOF. This became another case of designing the look given the situation, rather than fighting it. There was no way, realistically, I would be able to make this a ‘perfect focus, all the time’ video, so let’s turn that to our advantage, let’s make that part of the look.

Incidentally, one of my biggest worries was one of the 5DmkII’s big weaknesses; it has terrible rolling shutter (a.k.a. jellyvision) problems, which are particularly exacerbated when shooting hand held. If you do step through some shots frame by frame you can clearly see it, but interestingly, watched normally you don’t. It’s funny, it seems to just blend into the hand held look and feel.

The Crypt was a pretty cool location, I had not been there prior to the shoot day and I was very happy that seemed to fit the concept quite nicely. The alcoves, the band’s gear, the junk, the random lighting fixtures around the place, it was great. But it was dark. The basic lighting plan was to pick up a couple of 400w halogen work lamps from B&Q, and rig them in the alcoves cross lighting the band. These lamps are great, they give of a great quality of light, come with stands and cost next to nothing. I had also arranged to borrow (from Barnaby again) a small domestic lamp (without shade), which I fitted with a standard 100w bulb. This was attached to an extension lead enabling me to easily move it around wherever I needed a little more light. In addition, the various fixtures already in place provided background and there was a desk lamp on the piano which provided a nice key for lead singer Simon Wainwright. I was a little worried by the mix of colour temperatures about the place but the 5DmkII handled it pretty well.

I ran around with just the camera body, the 100mm macro and nothing more for maximum mobility. The band agreed to do the song a few times and I shot as much as I could of everybody at the right times. I was also able to grab instrument pick-ups from other songs as they rehearsed them. The takes of James were continuous, I moved from one person to the next trying to catch whatever moments I could. In addition one take was just of Simon to ensure I had a complete vocal take. I took a bit of a gamble with these takes in that they weren’t done to playback or even a click track. Before the start of each take drummer Gary Stewart played back the beginning of the track on his phone (of all things) to get the tempo and we would start rolling. I am pleased to say that Gary has outstanding rhythm, his timing was spot on for the entirety of the song. That said I had a little panic when it came to syncing to the recorded track as it didn’t line up straight initially. As it turns out, I think his phone has some playback issues as once I sped the track up slightly (~1.02%) it lined up perfectly; each take that is. Incredible!

Minor sync panics aside, the edit was kinda interesting. The ultra fast cutting was always going to be a challenge. The approach was to treat it like a multi-camera edit. I synced each full length take to the song and to each other setting them up as a multi-angle shot in Final Cut Pro. During playback I was then essentially able to edit in real time. I did this several times identifying the best sections from each run and used them to build up a master edit. I have to say I really liked this way of doing things, it had a sort of tactile organic feel. There was still a lot of finessing to do; a lot of the cut points needed tweaking and there were edits where no ‘angles’ were right, so I had to find better moments from other takes or indeed pickups from other songs. In the end there were 369 edits over the 4 minutes and 10 seconds that make up the finished video.

When it came to the grade, I believe the original plan was high contrast black and white but I wasn’t totally convinced, so it was shot in colour (ISO 1250, neutral picture style, sharpness: 0, saturation -3, contrast: -1 for any Canon xD movie geeks still reading ;-)). Just as well, as it became apparent quite quickly when putting the cut together that colour would be important and a green and gold theme started to emerge. This fitted the tone of the song very well and I think became a integral part of the overall feel of the finished video. Because it was a case of one lighting setup and shoot everything (with the exception of my roaming 100w), the shots as cut together were pretty uneven and required a lot of time and effort to get them to match nicely. I knew this would be the case going into the project and while I don’t know what the shoot to post ratio was in the end, given the shoot was two and a half hours I imagine we are talking double digits to one! (I am not sure about the figures of 15 minutes to shoot and 2 days to edit & grade that were posted on the Hope & Social Blog yesterday. Although technically true in the sense that they went through the same song 3 extra times just for the purpose of this video; and I suppose if you took 2 days to literally mean ~48hrs of work, that wouldn’t be far off the mark…)

In the end everything just seemed to fit, the song, the concept, the location, the performances. It’s kinda nice when that happens, because it doesn’t always. I think it is important to acknowledge when it does, especially when you are sort of winging it!

Hope & Social - James - Coming Soon...

Click to enlarge. You know you want to, the devil is in the detail…

Four Day Hombre - The First Word Is The Hardest

Director: Mark Wordsworth
Director of Photography: Ross McWhannell
Camera Operator: Fabian Wagner
Editor: Ross McWhannell

I love anamorphic. I love it for all it’s flaws. You see, flaws add character and anamorphic lenses have a character all of their own that gives them a certain something, and I can’t get enough of it. Now, this is not a format you get to shoot with very often, but sometimes a project comes along that is such a perfect fit for it that you simply have to go out of your way to make it happen.

Early in pre-production, director Mark Wordsworth and I were working out the storyboards at my flat. We spent a lot of time discussing shots, drawing, scanning and then editing them to the track. This was incredibly useful structurally and proved to be a great communication tool. One of the things that became apparent early on was the number of shots from either the inside of the car looking out or the outside of the car looking in. This leads to a massive contrast ratio, and retaining detail in both the highlights and shadows was going to be a challenge. The only real solution was to shoot on film. We had by this point decided on the scope framing, so to me it was clear that we needed to shoot this on 35mm anamorphic. The tone of the story, the landscapes, the contrast issues, it couldn’t be more perfect. Of course we had very little money, like 1000 Bulbs, First Word was completely band funded, so the question was, was there any way it could be done?

I had been at talk by Joe Dunton at the Bradford Film Festival some months earlier where he had been talking about anamorphic cinematography. It was a great talk during which he reiterated his company (Joe Dunton Camera) would be happy to help any production shoot in the format wherever possible. So, when it came to this project I gave them a call and they were able to offer us a great deal on a camera kit (Arriflex 35III, 50mm & 100mm anamorphic lenses - Cookes I think, but I can’t quite remember). I was also fortunate to be able to source a box of short ends from Fujifilm and camera operator Fabian Wagner was able to get us a great deal on processing and telecine at Film Lab North and the Finishing School.

We were able to source a cheap secondhand car that we could beat up as well as a trailer we could attach it to so we could get the ‘through the windscreen’ shots under tow. I am sure someone has some photos of this rig, it was spectacularly DIY, but it worked a treat! The band were able to pull more strings when it came to the location of moors part of the shoot, they had played a number of times at a pub called The Lion Inn in Blakey Ridge and knew the owners very well. We were able to use the Inn as our base and Blakey Ridge served as our backdrop.

We had 2 1/2 days to get the video in the can, 1/2 a day in Leeds to get the opening and 2 days out on the moors. This wasn’t an easy shoot, filming in the north of England in November is a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand you have this wonderful low golden light all day long, an absolute joy for a photographer, but on the other hand the days are so so short… We were under a lot of pressure and a few compromises had to be made but we got there in the end (even though we were using car headlights to simulate sunlight for closeups at the end of the last day!). Aside from our DIY car rig, we were largely hand held, and I think Fabian - once again supported by Borja Berrosteguieta - did a great job (that camera, fully loaded is not exactly light weight).

One of the slightly nerve-wracking things about shooting film on such a short and low budget project is you don’t generally get the benefit of dailies, and this shoot was no different. We didn’t get to see a frame of what we shot until the production wrapped, so there were some tense moments waiting for the call from the lab saying everything was ok. My biggest fear during this time was whether film was able to hold the massive contrast range during the ‘through the windscreen’ shots and, boy was I stunned when I finally got to see the footage; film had retained more highlight and shadow detail than I could have dreamed of! Bear in mind, we had done no testing as there was time or money for it. I remember when we shot those scenes, looking at my light meter and thinking to myself ‘ok, well… in film we trust…’.

Editing was made a lot easier by having the animated storyboards as a reference. While there was a fair amount of tweaking to be done to get the rhythm of the edit to match the rhythm and feel of the song, the edit came together reasonably quickly. Early on in the project Mark and I had discussed a progression of colour throughout the video. At one point we even thought about gradually increasing saturation from B&W to vibrant colour over the course of the track, but in the end a cool to warm progression seemed to be the right fit. We then just needed to add the lighting effects to the boy as he runs at the end and we were done.

I still can’t quite believe we managed to pull it off. It was an ambitious project given our resources and 35mm anamorphic was definitely the right way to do it. We were pretty lucky with the way things seemed to fall into place at times and are eternally grateful to all those folk who went out of their way to make it happen.

Did I mention I love anamorphic?

Four Day Hombre - 1000 Bulbs

Director: Mark Wordsworth
Lighting Cameraman: Ross McWhannell
Operating Cameraman: Fabian Wagner
Post: Ross McWhannell

This shoot was a few years back now, so forgive me if the details are a little sketchy. The production of the video was a wonderfully collaborative effort, a lot of hard work and a whole lot of fun. And I think it shows. I remember sitting with the band and our director Mark Wordsworth in pub in Leeds some time before the shoot commenced. He had made a cardboard cutout version of the set complete with Star Wars figures representing the principals, which he duly acted out to playback of the song. It was very cool, ambitious and everyone was sold.

We had very little money and there was no external funding; everything was paid for by the band. Luckily the band had a lot of contacts, friends and devoted fans happy to help out in any way they could. One such contact came in the form of the band’s shared history with Lancaster University. Lead singer Simon Wainwright was heavily involved in the theatre programme there and they were able to provide us with a large studio space complete with overhead lighting rigs, a lighting console and plenty of power. They also provided the camera (a Panasonic DVX100) and the Glidecam rig as I recall.

We had two and half days to get the elusive one-take, including building the set. Construction and pre-lighting started on the Friday afternoon, we could start choreographing the camera move on the Saturday and we had to pretty much know what we were doing when all of our extras arrived on Sunday, so the race was on.

This was a completely new challenge for me, with numerous firsts in terms of experience. I had never worked on such a large set with so many moving parts, it was a whole new world. I had also never worked with a camera operator before, and on this set it was never even a consideration that I would operate; managing the lighting was more than a full time job. Fabian Wagner operated the Glidecam and I think he and assistant Borja Berrosteguieta did a tremendous job.

Working with such a lighting toy box was a first for me and I was a bit like kid in a candy store. Right off the bat we got lucky. The lighting console was MIDI controllable so we were able to hook up keyboardist Ed Waring’s laptop for playback and use a sequencer to program the lighting cues. This enabled us to do a whole lot more than we would otherwise have been able to. In addition to the stage lights, we also rigged numerous (though thankfully not a thousand) domestic bulbs around the performance area and several strategically placed china-ball lanterns around the set as a whole, again all controllable via the console.

During shooting, myself and Mark would hide in our little control centre with the aforementioned lighting console and a monitor. If you look at the back of the nightclub section you will see a curtain, we were just behind there. The set was Oz and we felt like the wizard. Incidentally, kudos to Borja for bashing that monitor cable to our emerald castle, we had no money for a wireless feed and keeping that cable out of everyone’s way took some skill.

Before we knew it it was Sunday. The set started to fill with extras which of course changed everything, but it started to come together and eventually after several hours and many takes we finally nailed it. What you see is the final take of the day in its entirety. The combined sense of pride and relief when got there was palpable.

On to post, and while there was no editing to do so to speak, there was still a fair amount of polishing to be done. Although we were finishing 16x9, the camera’s native frame was 4:3, so what we lost in resolution we made up for in that we were able to smooth out any minor bumps in the move. Grading was also quite novel, evening up a continuous take required smoothly key-framing the look section by section, and it took quite a while as I recall.

While shooting on DV certainly had it’s limitations, it was absolutely the only choice we really had. We used the tiny sensor on the DVX100 to our advantage to give us that massive depth of field. This was not only practical - remote follow focus was well out of our league - but provided us with that ‘everything in focus’ look that is a big part of the aesthetic of the finished piece and I think it really works.

Terrific work from everybody who worked so hard to make this happen, it really was a lot of fun.