I've always been a big fan of the Gracies. I have really fond memories of the first time that my dad let me hang out with him and his friends in a man to man kind of way, I was about 15. My dad had "caveman BBQ's" and all the guys would come over and watch "Bare Knuckles Fighting", which was basically UFC when it first started and was something brand new. Some say that the UFC was started for the Gracies and Royce Gracie. This was manly stuff and I was finally allowed to watch it and hang out with the men. I will never forget seeing Royce Gracie fight and hearing stories from some of the other guys about some of his fights. I learned quickly that Jiu-Jitsu is a great fighting technique that works and can allow a smaller man to defeat a much larger and even stronger man.
Through-out the years I have watched the Gracies fight and watched their instructional DVD's. I even learned some of their moves and used them successfully in fights back in the day. (true story).
When Ralek Gracie hit me up to do Grip & Lighting on his music video, I thought that that was pretty cool. Ralek Gracie is a Jiu-Jitsu fighter but he is also a musician and he came up with a cool song and music video concept that he hired me to be a part of. I talked to Ralek the night before the shoot to make sure that I could in fact do the shoot, because as it turns out I was already scheduled to shoot footage for another music video earlier that day in Manhattan Beach. I coordinated the earlier shoot which needed very minimal equipment and then I wrote down what gear I would be bringing to Ralek's shoot in accordance with his budget.
By 5:30 on Tuesday November 15th the sun had completely set and I had shot some beautiful sunset shots right near the ocean with a classic restored 50's Cadillac. I then headed to a warehouse which was about 15 minutes away to shoot with Ralek.
I got to the warehouse where I met Ralek Gracie and my DP, Echo Charles. Echo was really cool to work with because he was laid back while being efficient at the same time. These are important qualities for a Cinematographer to have because, obviously everybody wants their video to come out amazing; freaking out will not help you get an amazing video. Echo was smart, on point and very easy to collaborate with. Echo took my suggestions about various lighting options and made the final decision on everything. I really liked the visual product that we created for this shoot. Jason Haberman and his partner woman Neysa, were also there to help me with the Lighting and Jason brought his own extensive skills to our collaboration. Echo brought his own partner woman, Sara; Sara and Neysa were a big help on this shoot. (Dang, I need to get my own partner woman….)
As soon as I rolled my truck into the warehouse and met Ralek and Echo, we wasted no time getting down to business and started talking about the shots that we wanted to get. Ralek reiterated the concept that he told me the night before and showed me where he wanted to film and we talked about the angles and possible framing. I formulated a lighting plan and then found out where the power outlets were. I was a little nervous about not having enough power to run all of the lights that I initially wanted but we were able to run enough stingers in order to get what we wanted.
[AGrip TIP: Always have lots of surge protectors and cube taps with you. Go crazy and bring 1 cube tap or surge protector for every stinger that you bring.]
We carried over the matts that would go on the ground that the fighters would perform and fight on. We arranged pallets so that people could stand on them and we also made a DJ booth out of pallets. I climbed up high into the steel shelving to rig a tungsten light that was gelled with a party color, to shine onto the DJ booth. I hooked up a fog machine behind the pallets that made up the DJ booth and then I hooked up a Tungsten Fresnel unit to backlight the fog, I put the unit on a dimmer so that we could lower the intensity and I wanted it to go slightly warmer. I used my Kino tubes to light the floor in a cool and moody way and since the fighting Matt had a shiny black finish the Kino bulbs made cool reflections off of it. I made sure to establish areas of our "white light" for the night which was tungsten and then mix in other areas with color. At this point I started to notice that my DP, Echo, had brought some cool lights of his own; what was also cool is that his LED Spot lights were battery powered. They were a daylight color temperature and we used them in the frame, and to back light the fog in the upper section of our frame. When the warmer tungsten light backlighting the bottom of the fog mixed with the daylight that was backlighting the top part of the fog it created a really awesome purple color especially where the two lights met. To be honest this scene looked great and to top it all off we had 3 sections of my 45 degree curved track to use to capture the performance shots.
Echo did a great job of operating the camera and setting it up. We quickly fine-tuned things and we were very happy with the image that we created. Ralek came back from getting food and champagne and he brought about 30 people with him. I got to meet some of the other Gracies which was cool and they also brought quite a few hot chic’s with them.
In no time we were filming. The shoot went smooth and everybody was having a lot of fun. The song was an upbeat song and so people were dancing and grooving to the music while they watched the fights; I have done a lot of shoots where we have to tell extras to get into it, that wasn't the case with this shoot, there was no acting everybody was really having a good time.
I give major props to Ralek for coming up with the idea for this video. As a music video maker we are always looking for something interesting to shoot with dynamic camera movement; this was the first time that I have seen fighting moves done like this and it looked awesome. All of the fighters that we used were actual pro fighters and they looked the part, they each had a few moves that were unique and looked interesting on camera.
When we were done with the main set up we filmed Ralek and his crew breaking into the warehouse. The last shot of this night was a really cool one; we took all of the people who came to the video and had them go outside near the roll up door to the warehouse. I did some simple lighting (that I thought was pretty nice) and then we had Ralek open the door, as the door slid open fog came into the frame and we dollied back quickly as a massive amount of cool looking people flowed into the warehouse.
This shoot was a lot of fun, it was cool to meet the Gracies and I also got to hang out with my friend Angelo Costa who directed the Donnie video that you can read about on my blog.
Stay tuned for the video, you can catch it on this blog in the future.
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