MB: App Promo

Once again, time to share some ideas and some thoughts i've collected after a recent project here at Musicbed. (musicbed.com). We recently ventured into another Promotional piece for the new version of our Musicbed App. We had a lot of thoughts of different things we wanted to try and different ways we wanted to communicate them visually. 

We wanted to diversify our view a little bit and make our character a kick ass female director. And we wanted this film to feel more sporadic. So that it felt more like a glimpse into someones "way of life" as apposed to maybe just "a day in the life". 

As usual I started on Evernote, going through my huge collection of stills, and also finding some new ones. Here's what the evernote looked like for this film. 

We kept it pretty simple on this one. We actually did some pretty extensive storyboarding, Laying out every shot on a table, arranging and rearranging into what felt right. This made our edit pretty damn fast. And it also allowed us to shoot this entire film in just two days. 

Here's our reference stills we were using for our treatment. 

These images serve for more of a vernal theme of elements, not so much framing and tone. We wanted to give the feeling of being all over the place. mixing life and work and creativity all into one pot. 

One of our biggest references for this was a commercial spot shot by Gustav Johansson and Casper Belslev. 

Again, just a reference. I get really nervous about copying someones work, and or repeating someones feeling. I know the utmost important thing is to be true to your brand. Be true to who you're working for. So use anything and everything for inspiration, and then filter that all through the layers of your brand. 

So the biggest need for this film was good producing. Luckily our team has one of the best and his name is Ezra Cohen. This film needed to be done on a pretty tight budget and timeframe. So Ezra went to work  on scheduling, finding talent, and organizing locations. not an easy or quick task. Needles to say, he killed it. We made 10 locations happen in just two days with a crew of three guys. Props to him. Oh! and he also is a pretty damn good DOP. So he shot it as well :)

We wanted to be pretty mobile, so our gear package was very small. We made good use of simple bounce techniques and natural lighting from our great locations. My favorite shot came from a completely natural source. I had never noticed that the pool at me and my wife apartment complex could have ever looked so cool. 

Our gear consisted of our Red Dragon, sticking mainly with a 35mm 1.4 Zeiss. And than the occasionally Canon 70-200. We shot at 6k with a 8:1 compression. with 1/8 Promist and Tiffen ND's .4 .6 and 1.2. Our friend Ryan Booth has been DPing a project for us for a while and has lived by promist. And we've fallen in love with it. 

For lighting we used 2 tweenies, 2 Mole 2k's, Kino Flo Diva, and bleached and unbleached muslin for bounce or diffusion, as well as a simple roll of 216 diffusion for whatever. The biggest winner for natural lighting is gonna be your Floppies and negative fill. You gotta live by the sun and negative fill. Thats the secret. Get that under your belt and you'll do some damage. 

We kept all of our interior lighting pretty motivated. We kind of chalked it up to a pretty good formula.

1. Set practicals. 
2. enhance what is already there. 
3. Create Black (contrast)
4. A-B everything
5. no excess. (don't overdue it)

The biggest thing i've learned about lighting in the last couple months is that the smallest adjustments make the biggest differences. Adding something that only adds maybe a small stroke on the canvas is what makes someone better than the rest. Also knowing how much is too much. Knowing when to cut back, or not add anything at all. 

Here's some examples of our interior setups. 

Here is the lighting diagram showing the setup. 

We also had the challenge of doing a day interior with practically no larger sources. our largest lights were just 2k fresnels. so we picked the right location and added a sun streak instead of trying to fake our way out of it. 

At the end of the shoot, we ended up pretty happen about what we captured. Our talent was great, or team was great. Everything came together on this one. Here's all the screenshots from the film. 

Here's the finished piece. 

MB Tutorial Shoot

The other day we had a small one day shoot for a tutorial video Music Bed is putting out soon. This was somewhat a departure for our normal style. I don't think i'm too good at commercial style films. Clean, tight, sharp. I’ve just never seen things that way. I like things to be moving, and less contrived. But there’s a time for everything right? I took this opportunity to learn some new things. 

I thought it would interesting to put up our diagrams and show some results. We are trying new techniques every time we shoot. Or at least we should be trying to learn something new, and trying to do something that is a little unfamiliar. 

All stills are ungraded from Premiere after we kicked out Prores 422 proxies. 

MB Commercial

Here at MB we get the opportunity to help. Whether its finding music, or giving some inspirational thoughts. we always try and be givers of information. So we thought it would be helpful to speak about our process for a specific project. Whether you're just starting out our have been doing all this stuff before we were born, maybe it will still help. We hope. 

PRE-PRO

everything starts here. Its were we everything gets on the table and nothing is left unsaid. It usually starts with some of our creative team sitting around a table discussing what we have coming up, and then begin pounding away at the creative side. We recently starting out on a Music Bed commercial or promo or whatever you'd like to call it. So we start with inspiration. 

Going into the project the feeling was clear but the practicals were not. We were getting inspired by this one Spotify piece. 

It captured the feeling we wanted. But we wanted to push it a little further into OUR culture. We have a different culture then they do. More business young adult types. creative, young, smart, and driven. 

Our challenge would be incapsulating everything our service has to offer as a music licensing company (filter browsing, mood playlist, live chat, wish lists) all in a single 2 minute add. its a lot. So we came up with the idea of following a freelance filmmaker on his way to work, while on his way to work, he could use all the different features while he's looking for music for different client projects. bangarang. 

After ironing out the idea, and how the elements would transition together. I started in on Evernote. Evernote is where my brain pours into. Its the best way to be searching for inspiration and to collect them into a single place. And it looks pretty sweet too. 

This includes everything. Fashion, weather, mood boards, video references, technical specs. 

A big reference for us was a video by Benjamin Loeb called "Ancient Mars". I loved the color pallette and the 48 FPS he was using. And the flatness of it. 

LOCATION SCOUT

After getting all the references we could find, we start developing into our production day. Where we were gonna hit at what times of the day. The types of locations we needed. We narrowed it down into 4 different location spots - a loft, bike riding (downtown Dallas), a train / subway, and a coworking space / agency. 

Once we knew what we needed we just started making phone calls. Everyone has a lot of friends, and everyone has a lot of connections that you can pull on. I can count on one hand the times we've actually paid for a location. We just use our friends who are doing the same things we are, usually they want to help us out.  So for this we pulled on our friends over at Stripes Agency in Dallas for the office space. As we started asking around for a loft space, turns out Stripes very own filmmaker Rob Martinez has a perfect one, not far from the office. 

Location scouting pics

We knew we wanted our good buddy Jersean to be our talent. He's a local filmmaker/photographer that also happens to have a pretty great style. He also just encompasses what the film is about. 

Jersean.com

ON TO PRODUCTION

The thing that i'm still learning is that no matter what I do in pre production, not everything will go my way. There will be things in the shoot that just don't work when you thought it was a sure fire thing. But its you're job as a filmmaker to push through them, and also be you're best in the midst of them. There are countless things that come up on the shoot but on this particular shoot day it really came down to time, and crew. Or lack there of. We're a small company trying to do our best. But sometimes we gotta run with a small crew. On this film it was Me (christian) Max and Jersean. das it. In hind sight we probably could of brought some other people in, even if they were just there to lift some things. Always learn from you're mistakes! 

We shot this film on our Red Epic Dragon at 6k with various lenses, but mainly Zeiss CP2's. 

Red Epic Dragon - Canon 70-200

We started out our first day at our buddy Robs house. This is also were the film starts. The loft was a spacious concrete room with white walls on two sides. also a lot of exposed brick. The best part was this amazing morning light that we caught that shoots through the top windows. We brought a D50 hazer with us to haze the room anyways, but we didn't expect it to look this good.

The lighting setup we kept very simple. We Used the sunlight as some backlight (hazed). backlit is neck with a kino flo 4 bank, and bounced a Tweenie off of unbleached muslin 6x6. All the lighting that we do we try and keep it incredibly natural looking. Everything should be motivated. unless it just looks cool then it doesn't matter. :)

zeiss cp.2 50mm

zeiss 24 mm cp2

First scene down, we moved on to our next scenes. We only had one problem. The setup of this first scene took out all our morning light. We wrapped this location around 10:30 am meaning that the son was a little to high now. We made a call to just go on to the agency spot, then hit the train ride at dusk, and then hit the bike riding the next morning and try and blend them together in the edit to make them the same time of day. 

Once we arrived at Stripes we went into our planned lighting setup, which was already planned out due to our location scouting.

Location scouting pics

Location scouting pics

The building that Stripes is in, is covered 360 by other buildings. So only at 4 or 5 pm would you get direct sunlight into the office. the office space also has no interior lighting, only natural lighting. It goes with their vibe and color schemes so its a nice fit. but we needed to compensate with some fill light. We picked a light side and a dark side of the room, and set up our kino 4 banks on the light side. The key is to create black somewhere in the image. We did this by directing light into one side, and subtracting it on the dark side. You can subtract light in a lot of ways, using black solids, closing curtains or blinds. Be creative! For this situation we did both. Closed the blinds and put up some floppies. 

Zeiss 24 mm CP.2

After we got the wide coverage we moved into the closeups. I find it easier when i go from wide to close. One reason being I always move my lights in for closeups. rearranging them and cutting them and squeezing them to look like what i need. A wide lighting setups most times won't and shoulnd't be you're close up setup. 

With everything in the room being so reflective, I needed to subtract some light from Jerseans face in order to create contrast and focus on his eyes. We did this by moving one 4 bank to act as window light coming at him at a 45 degree angle. then keeping one 4 bank fairly far away creating a rim on his neckline, then from one side of his face at another 45 degree angle, setting up a simple floppy to subtract and bounce that may come anywhere. I found my self moving the negative fill closer and closer the tighter I was getting. 

two 4 bank kino flo's, 1 neg fill

two 4 bank kino flo's, 1 neg fill

Canon 70-200

Zeiss 50mm CP.2

screen flow animation

Wrapping at Stripes we now moved on to our last scene of the day, which was Dallas's Dart public trans system. Its completely unknown environment, so we striped away everything only took what we needed. So we had the Dragon with a top handle, and two lenses we could switch to. While packing a punch the Dragon is extremely light. Depending on what lenses you have on it, it will most likely be under 12 pounds. fairly portable for a cinema camera. 

We got on a train that we new would cross paths with the sun, then knowing where it was gonna hit, we tried to place Jersean on that side, to create a nice soft sunlight. Everything we captured was availble light, no led's or bounces. 

zeiss 21mm CP.2

zeiss 50mm CP.2

zeiss 50mm CP.2

Tony Anderson

i've been learning recently that I really have no clue about the outcome of any given project. I can put a lot of effort into knowing every aspect of a story before I set out to do it, but some how it ends up becoming something else. More times than not, better than I thought it could have been in the first place. If anything this makes me feel inadequate, like i'm not good enough to control a story in some way. But so what, PHE!

Me and max recently got back from shooting a story on Tony Anderson. An amazing composer and one individual that is pretty damn talented. Even if he doesn't think so.

I'm not really sure what I thought this project was gonna be when we set out. During pre production our plates were a little full with other projects. So the pre pro really went through a run of the mill research and prep time, nothing special. Going into it we thought we could tell a pretty good story of success, and how its not all its cracked up to be. When money and a little bit of fame creep into your art, it tends to get a little watered down, mainly because you're scared to lose what you have.  This is right where Tony was sitting. in a place of limbo, trying to get back. 

Here are some stills we were referencing for mood. and lighting. Most of our reference stills come from photography. Photographers that we like and think have a unique cinematic style. Ex: Mac Scott, Rog Walker, Henrik Knudsen, Lina Scheunius. To name a few. 

sounds great right? sure.

We flew out to Lexington Kentucky and started on our normal routine, hanging out with Tony, getting dinner, talking about what he's doing currently, shooting the breeze. This time with an artist is always the most valuable time. It brakes down the barriers that would noramlly be in place when you have an agenda. The agenda being the camera over you're shoulder.  We talked about wine, and music, and also wine. But then he started to talk about this guy named Donnie Robison.

Donnie started showing up at his studio door when he was moving in. He was really being a distraction. Tony initially was blowing him off, saying "Hey man I got deadlines I need to crank on." Tony's relationship with Donnie started to get revealed to him as something opposite of what he thought it would be. He was assuming that he needed to be there for Donnie. Give Donnie love and friendship. But Tony discovered it was much of the opposite. Donnie was there for Tony. 

The film become about the relationship. or rather relationships that bring us out of ourselves. The ones that make us sacrifice somethings. The ones that remind us that life isn't about "me" and my way of life. Its hard when you get out of your comfort zone and have to do something that you wouldn't normally find yourself doing. 

In the end, it came out lovely. 

We mainly used the Canon C100 with a 24-105 for all the doc style stuff. And for the slomo we used the C500 to a odyssey 7q.