On October 15th I shot a music video for Doni Flanigan. Angelo Costa hit me up to do this shoot. Some of you may have seen a prior blog entry where I talked about a night of shooting at a country western club for Donnie’s video with Director Angelo Costa; this was day two of the "Git Yer Twang On" shoot. Angelo got a sweet location in Norco at a guy’s house who was a country western and history aficionado. He had some cool things on his property like a saloon, a small stage to perform on and a barn; he also had old frontier wagons and a cool water tower and fire pit. Everything was miniaturized and kind of a facade. During the day the place looked pretty cool but I knew that at night it would be really great because we would control the light in order to only light up what we wanted to light up. Unfortunately this place did not have a lot of power so we had to bring generators. My 2000W Generator put in work on this night and was ran to its capacity. We also had a 6500W Generator.
This was the 2nd shoot that the AGrip Jib has been used on. Angelo and I talked in advance about using the jib for this and Angelo actually came over several times to practice using the Jib. I contacted Austin Ahlborg about being my Jib assistant.
The day of the shoot we gathered at the location in Norco. I began setting up the Jib with Austin. Angelo set up some Par Cans on the stage to light up Donnie’s performance on the stage. We began doing test shots with the jib while the sun was still up and we began to devise a plan while we listened to Angelo’s thoughts on what he wanted. The plan was to have Donny drive up in a really cool classic country western looking truck, as we jibbed up, he would get out with his girl and they would walk through the crowd up to the stage where he would begin performing with a band. Like I said, power was tough so we ended up using the 2000W generator on the back side of our set, and the 6500 on the front side. We didn't want cables running all over and also since we were using the Jib which had much wider areas of perspective we needed to hide the lights more than usual. We came up with a system and we also got the fire pit going. We used full CTO on one of the lights that was lighting up the water town and that worked because it mimicked the color from the fire. We put up a key light for the truck and a backlight as well. I wanted to use half CTO on the backlight in order to separate it from the key light and I knew that the fire would motivate the warmer color. We side lit the stage and the crowd with a powerful light with diffusion on it. Things were ready, we practiced the jib move and it looked great. Angelo operated the jib for this, we did a few takes to get the truck roll up and have Donny get out.
We filmed Donnie’s performance on the stage and it was pretty good. It took some work getting the crowd into it, we had a nice crowd and they were dressed to fit the occasion and there was lots of pretty girls; unfortunately some of the guys were tired or something and were not ready to "Get their Twang on". We had to move some girls to the outside of the crowd to get an illusion that this was a really intense crowd. The set looked great with the saloon and the par cans that were gelled different party colors, with the red barn next to the stage. While Angelo was getting the Jib shots with Austin spotting him I began to set up the Steadicam and some lite panel lights. As soon as Angelo was done He strapped on the Steadicam vest and I grabbed a c stand arm and a lite panel and we moved into the crowd for close ups. We made some pathways in the crowd for Angelo to move through. The scene was already lit but we used the lite panel in order to get that little bit extra exposure and I tried to keep it somewhat frontal and subtle. I tried to notice where Angelo was going to go and then I would move there where I wouldn't interfere with his movements, then I would aim the light and not move it. I tried to keep my light not moving as much as possible so that we could cut around the lighting changes. This was a largish crowd and this is intercut b roll footage so we were not too concerned about big changes in the lighting. We moved all around getting cool shots of the band, Donny, the crowd, girls dancing. It was great. It was great to be able to use the Jib the way we did and then move in with the Steadicam. Some shoots, you need to move fast and this was one of them and we moved fast and got great product. I like this style of shooting. I wouldn't shoot every video in this quick up-tempo style but i think it is great to shoot maybe half the videos I do in this manner.
When we were done with that location we moved people over to the bonfire area, a lot of people were sitting in a large circle around the fire. This scene was already lit for us as we did our major lighting in the begging in. We did the same thing with the lite panel that we did for the crowd performance stuff. We ran around the outside of the circle and the footage looked great, very dynamic as the people were moving by the frame in the foreground with the other side of the circle moving the other direction. We ran around the circle and then ran through a gap in the circle up to Donny who was sitting there with his girl.
All in all it was a fast and simple shoot with a lot of energy and the footage looked great. Everything had a lot of character because of the sets and our jib and Steadicam movements and also you could tell that people were having fun.
This is going to be a really great little music video and I can't wait for it to come out. We have a really good editor for this and Angelo is giving him the cream of the crop footage. Stay tuned for this video, I will post it on this blog and when I do you can say to yourself before you watch it: "It’s time to get my twang on"
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