Casino Redd Music Video

On the weekend of September 24th & 25th I shot a music video for rapper Casino Redd. Director Daniel Anthony scheduled me for this shoot a month and half in advance. Daniel worked with an excellent storyboard artist in order to plan the vision of this music video. Daniel spoke with me about the locations and time frames and I chose the equipment to bring for the shoot.

I worked closely with DP Isaac Bauman on this shoot as well as our camera Operator Megan Richardson.

This was my second time working with Isaac. I have been very impressed with his work. The first music video that I saw that he DP'd for Daniel Anthony that brought him to my attention is this video: Express Fresh Video

The song for our Casino Redd video was about how the artist, Casino Redd's new girl is not as hot as his old girl but she is hotter then YOUR new girl. We had a lot of very pretty ladies for this music video. The first location was a strip club in the valley. This strip club was very seedy and kind of like a dive bar, more like a titty bar than a strip club; however the way we framed it and lit it, I think it looked cool. We only had from 8 to 11 to film in this location and unfortunately some of our girls showed up late and also took a little while to do their make-up. We moved fast and filmed what we could film with Casino Red. We got some angles of the girls dancing that I think were really nice. I saw the story boards when I got to that first location in the morning and I thought, "hmmm these are nice storyboards I hope we live up to them!" haha, I think we did but you will have to be the judge of that. I will post the video on this blog when it is released.

We wrapped it up quickly when our time was up at 11 and then we moved on to the second location. This second location was a really nice choice by Daniel Anthony, it was his former cinematography college. We filmed a classroom scene that had a lot of fantasy elements to it. Originally it was supposed to be a regular school day but we changed it to Detention and I think that worked better. One of Daniels former teachers played the teacher and he was very funny and excellent in that role. I was really impressed with the performances that Daniel was able to get out of the actors, he knew just what to say to them in order to get them to do what he wanted. One of the actors who he wanted to act paranoid, he told him to act like a meerkat and then he did an impression of a one. (video of a meerkat) Sure enough, the actor was able to do a great meerkat inspired acting job as he tried to not get caught using his cell phone in detention. This scene was a lot of fun to film and of particular coolness was that, the school had a Fisher Dolly right there for us to use. I pushed the dolly and controlled the hydraulic arm while Isaac operated camera and Megan controlled the focus. We filmed some cool shots. Our lighting style was minimalistic for this but I think the footage looked great. We filmed a fantasy part where the school girl turns into a vixen, we used more of a back light from one of my lights and then we used a LitePanel that I hand held in a certain way to cause a lens flair that gave the footage a really cool dreamy effect. Honestly, that was some of my favorite footage that I've shot.

Next we moved down the hall to a green screen studio that the school had. Everything was pre-lit and I basically just rolled up dials in order to get the green screen lit and to get the lighting we wanted. Isaac wanted a more contrasty look and so we quickly got that going and filmed our performance scene there.

Daniel choosing the school was a great choice because the class room scene was really cool and also, it was a 5 second walk from a very convenient green screen studio.

The second day of the shoot, we had to adapt a little bit because we managed to get Freeway Ricky Ross to make a cameo in the video. Daniel had a great location in LA near a huge railroad depot, a lot of the backsides of the buildings had really colorful, great graffiti. The Real Rick Ross was live and in effect. Again, we got some beautiful footage this day and in that location, before we moved on to a bedroom scene to be filmed at a house. The lighting for the bedroom scene was simple but it worked well. The girl that we had was named Brittney and she was very beautiful and had a great personality as well. (All of the girls that we had for this video were very, very pretty)

Everybody had a lot of fun filming this part.

This was a great project to work on. I thought that these story boards were so cool. Normally, on the AGrip Blog I post a lot of pictures of the behind the scenes as well as a couple stills from the videos, but for this particular video I wanted to show you the story boards so that later you can watch the actual video and see how we did. I realize that we were not completely accurate to the story boards but I do think that it will be interesting to see how these drawings came to life in a way. So stay tuned for this video, I know you will enjoy it.

Music Video for Amal Al Refaie

http://youtu.be/cdC3Pcfyd6Y

yesterday I worked on a music video with Director Alaa Chami. This was my first time working with Alaa. He is very on point and he really put in the extra work. I liked the song that we were doing the video for, this is a musical style that I haven't done any music videos for yet. Every time the song came on I felt like dancing! It was hard to push the dolly because I wanted to dance instead of move the dolly smoothly (I managed).

The Artist's name was Amal Al Refaie and she was very beautiful and talented. Her daughters were on set also and they were very beautiful as well, they are like the cooler version of the Kardashians.


This shoot was a 3 day shoot. AGrip took care of all the grip lighting and camera support on the 3rd day. The first day I was not able to shoot with Alaa, but I know he had a lot of great stuff going on, like multiple helicopters, motorcycles and Bentleys as well as some intense post work.

While I was on set I got a chance to meet the guy that will be doing Post for this music video, he showed me his reel and I was blown away. His name is Michael Murdock and he is a very talented animator, compositer and post engineer. He showed me a clip that he was working with from the video, in the clip, the singer Amal blows up into 2 other versions of herself; it was awesome.

Also, this shoot was my first time actually working with a guy named Spencer Smith. I had met him before and spoken with him while standing in line at Wooden Nickel and I also had him as a Facebook friend. That guy is extremely professional, hard working and a really huge asset to any production.

This was my second time working with another young guy that I met at my music video shoot on Sunday 9/25/11. His name is Alvin and he too is a great worker who I think has LOTS of potential in the film industry. Check out his reel if you get a chance.

I was amazed at how quickly these guys all unloaded my truck when I got to the location in the morning. We shot in a cool warehouse location just for shooting in downtown LA. These kinds of locations are cool because you can take lots of gear there and then stay there all day, meticulously getting the shots you need without being inconvenienced by having to move to other locations.

One of my favorite shots from the video, is the shot upstairs in the warehouse where we filmed the singer Amal walking to her desk. We used lots of AGrip dolly track and Curved Track in order to sweep around, and get a dynamic shot that used forground objects like the metal support beams for the building, and paper chinese lanterns. It was great.

This shoot was a success and this is going to be a great music video.

Presenting Director Ryan Spencer's Music Video Reel

http://vimeo.com/29616897

I am very happy to present this video, I worked very hard on all of the videos that are included in this reel and it is very rewarding for me to be able to show you this compilation and talk about what went in to making them. My friend, Director Ryan Spencer is the main force behind all of these videos, as you can see, he has done a phenominal job and he has really put his heart and soul into his work over the course of the last year.


Please watch this in full screen and let it load first, make sure your speakers are turned up to a nice level. and enjoy it because we worked very hard on this! And we will work very hard on your video as well!

Ryan Spencer's Director Reel (2011) from Ryan Spencer on Vimeo.

I met Ryan through my friend, Ace Filmore, about 2 years ago when we made a music video. That first music video was an interesting experience and I could see from that first day that Ryan's work was very important to him. From then on we stayed in contact, we worked on a lot of smaller projects from time to time. Every single time that I work with Ryan we try to do our very best.

Country Music Video for Donny

On Wednesday 9.21.11, I shot part of a pretty cool music video for a Country Artist named Donny. We shot this at the Borderline Bar in Westlake. This is a really happening spot, a lot of really pretty ladies go there and its a fun country environment with beer and food and music, dancing and atmosphere.

Angelo hit me up to do this shoot, I met him on the set of another music video; he is a music producer and music video Director. We scoped this location out on a Thursday night the week before the shoot to see what it would look like. Wednesday's shoot was a breeze. We got there at 7pm, took the equipment in and I set up a few lights to supplement with the lighting that the club had. Lots of pretty country girls started to come into the building. I set up the steadicam and Angelo put on the vest. The management at the location agreed to let us play the song 4 times, throughout the night.

We asked them to play the song in the next few minutes, the steadicam was ready to go and I connected a LitePanel LED light to a C-Stand arm so that I could make sure that the artist had enough light on him at all times. I wanted to key him lightly and frontally in order to get a nice exposure on him that will stand out from the rest of the people, so that we could kind of keep the attention on him, the other lights in the club were doing a lot of the light modeling on the faces so I wanted the light panel frontal and very subtle just to smooth the face.

We went out on the floor, I was standing behind Angelo who was operating the Steadicam. The dance floor was very full and people were ready to really party for this music video, the song came on and Angelo ran around getting shots of Donny as he performed to his song. It was a lot of fun, Donny was grabbing girls and dancing with them and interacting as he played air guitar and had a great time. I could see that the girls dancing in the crowd were really going for it and they were having a great time.

After each time that we went through the song we looked at the footage while other songs played, we discussed what to do to get a better shot.

The next time the song played we tried some new things, then the 3rd time the song played I asked the DJ to try to get some of the people off of the dance floor so that we could move the steadicam around more and get more dynamic motion with it, these takes looked great. On the 3rd time we did the song, we took the doorway dolly onto the dance floor and had the Artist Donny sit on some apple boxes while the Angelo filmed him from the steadicam, while sitting on the dolly. It looked like Donny was floating through the crowd. It was cool, we only filmed about half of the song like that before Angelo got off the dolly and we did some other things.

One of the pretty girls in the video started to develop a crush on the director/camera man Angelo, and it was pretty funny to watch, I think it was the steadicam that got her all fired up.

All in all, we got some great footage and it was a super easy shoot, as well as very fun. I can't wait to see this video. Stay tuned for it!