e. gustavo petersen | cinematographer

What a glorious weekend – shooting a music video for singer/songwriter Sara Mann. It’s for a song from her upcoming album. You can listen to the song, “The End of You”, on her mySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/mannsara The video should be available for viewing by Valentines day. Keep a look out for it.

From a home in North Hollywood, the video includes both a performance and a narrative story element. The project is directed by Guy Julian – a name you’ll see often in the music video section of my resume. We shot the project using the Panasonic HVX200. As you may have read in a previous entry, I recently purchased a Lensbaby 3G and have been mostly using it for still photography. The Lensbaby is a selective focus lens. But after having seen it used on the feature film, “The Butterfly and the Diving Bell”, this seemed like a good device for what we were doing and a fine, real world test for an upcoming short film I’ll be shooting where the Lensbaby will get some use. To get the Lensbaby to work with the HVX, we used a Letus35 Extreme lens adaptor (↓ see photo). The Letus35 is an adaptor for using 35mm lenses on video cameras. Both worked extremely well in this application. The frame below was shot with the Lensbaby without any iris rings (ƒ/2.0). As expected from some testing my friend Clay and I did with the camera a few weeks back, the camera performed as expected. In this configurations, the camera is performing with an EI of 200.

↓ ↓ The following two photos are from shots that we did in hallway were we zoomed out on the camera enough to see the edges of the ground glass and partially see the mirrors on the Letus35. Personally, I love this stuff. It’s reminiscent of things I’ve gotten during telecine. Here we used a Nikkor 50mm (ƒ/1.8) lens.

↓ ↓ Below is the final lighting plan for the performance footage. In this room, hundreds of cards were hung buy fishing line – it’s an element of the song. The Lekos on the fireplace have Alice Blue (incidentally, the color is named after Alice Roosevelt Longworth – her favorite color and who happens to be Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest daughter). These lights flickered by using a Magic Gadget flicker box. They had been meant to wash the room with blue but they ended up being a blue wash for the background. Still good and perhaps better this way. The band is mostly backlit by Dedo lights and 420 Pepper lights which are also on the flicker box. They’re kept low to hit the lens from time to time as they pass through the hanging cards as we dolly back and forth. By and large, we shot wide open on the camera (ƒ/1.7) and with a 1/250 shutter (35°)

↑ ↑ From L > R: Phil Hurley (guitar) / Miles Crawford (drums) / Michael Eisenstein (bass) – Phil is in a band call “Stoneyhoney” -n- Miles has played in “Stomp” for years -n- Michael with his wife Kay Hanley were part of “Letters to Cleo” and is currently producing. If you look at the photo on the left toward the bottom right you see she show’s mascot, Maya.

↓ ↓ For the verses, we dolly in to one set of for two lines in the lyrics, then the set is changed and we then dolly out from the new set. We shot some balloons against a greenscreen and that’ll be composited between the shots. Many thanks to my wife for doing the set design and make-up.

↑ ↑ Guy directing Sara on our New Year’s set.

We had one set that needed to look like a dinner scene. Steaks for the shot where browned using a propane blow torch. Since my wife is a chef and she’s done food styling before, the trick not only worked it was fun too. I know because I got to brown one of the steaks – boys do love fire . The only thing that went on the steaks is a sprinkle of course salt. As I browned the one steak, I was struck by how like painting it was. I would darken an area and them move to the edges and fry the fat and blacken the bone and then darken another area until I felt it was done.

Vendors:

Camera : Indie Rentals
Grip & Electric : Wooden Nickel
Drum set sound dampeners : SIR

Ah yes… your moment of Zen. (Toby, our IT guy, our playback guy and all-round good guy.)