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.
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