This was an exciting shoot for me because I got to film a commercial on my own company's product for Advertising Production class. Club Killers is a company that focuses on DJs and anyone who generally loves music, through music and video production, as well as through clothing. This particular commercial was for our clothing brand. The talent was my friend DJ Earwaxxx, who DJs many clubs around the strip. We filmed it in the video room at The Art Institute of Las Vegas, utilizing the green screen. The equipment I used for this shoot was the Lumix GH4 4K camera, a crane jib, a tripod, and some Arri lights to evenly light the green screen, as well as my subject. The most difficult part of the shoot was lighting the green screen evenly with the amount of lights we had, because we also needed to shoot his whole body from head to toe. We did a lot of multiple takes - wide, medium, and closeups with the different outfits on. It took us about three hours for the entire shoot and I feel the final product came out very well. But, if I were to do it again I would tried directing him a little better with his actions and have taken a lot more wide shots of him.
You can watch the full commercial by clicking here!
Last week I was given the opportunity to film an interview with DJ Jeffrey Sutorius, the front man of the DJ/production group Dash Berlin. They are based from the Netherlands and have had many breakthrough and award-winning songs on the trance charts. Jeffrey was in town to headline an event at Marquee Nightclub, and he was nice to enough to come into the 98.5 KLUC studio to give a few lucky fans an exclusive one-hour interview where they were able to ask him questions too. I used four DSLR cameras for the interview, three on tripods and one hand-held. One of the camera was a medium shot on the interviewee DJ CO-1, the second was a medium shot on Jeffrey, the third was a wide 2-shot, and the fourth one was hand-held to give the interview a different feeling than just static shots. The studio already had some good lighting, however we setup two LED panels to brighten it up a little more. We recorded the audio of DJ CO-1 and Jeffrey directly into a computer using Adobe Audition from a Shure SM-58LC microphone. Audio came out excellent, except for when some of the fans asked questions because we did not have a wireless microphone to mic them. This was my first time shooting an interview that was almost like a press conference, so it was a good learning experience with maneuvering through the crowd and putting the cameras in the right position to not have them in the way of the fans. I also had to use zoom lenses on all the cameras since there was some distance from me to the subjects. Jeffrey is a humble and talented character, even at the end of the interview he took pictures with all the fans, signed autographs, and gave away free tickets to the few lucky fans who got to be there.
On a very early morning, like 3AM type morning, the crew woke up to shoot Luwee13's music video on the top of a mountain. Our director wanted to get the sunrise to get the perfect light from the sun, but we did not anticipate the sunrise to be about an hour and a half later then we expected. So while we waited, the crew pretty much caught our breath after a rough hike up the hill and carrying all the equipment. When the sun came up over into the valley, I have to say it was a beautiful sight to see. We knew we were only going to have the sunrise for a short period of time so I had to quickly get the DJi Phantom Vision Plus (drone) up in the air and try to get a few aerial shots. The weather conditions were great, it was not windy so I was able to control the Phantom. The difficulty with the Phantom is that the camera attached to the unit is only a fish-eye lens, therefore it is difficult to get everybody out of the shot because it is so wide of an angle. The director had to get everybody to hide behind big rocks so they would not be in the shot, but it was also hard for me to not get in the shot as well without seeing physically where the Phantom was flying. After getting the shots we wanted, it was a little difficult to land the Phantom because there was not a real flat surface for it to safely land on, however after a few tries I was able to land it. This location was amazing and I plan on filming there again in the near future.
You can watch the full music video by clicking here.
The "Rabbit Hole" dialogue project was manifested through my Acting and Directing class. I was fortunate to have two great actors in directing and filming this scene. The equipment I used was Lumix GH4 4K camera, three LED light panels, and a Rode NTG-2 shotgun microphone. Unfortunately, sound was my biggest obstacle because we were recording right next to a refrigerator, but I was planning to do re-recording of dialogue anyways so it was not too big of an issue. My two actors, Aaron and Katie did an amazing job because they both memorized the whole script so we were able to make this a quick shoot. We did a wide shot, medium shot, medium close-up on each character, and close-up on each character. After those shots, we did several cutaways and cut-ins. There was not much action in this so the actors really had to put a lot of emotion in it to give the scene a touching impact. I purposely made the set design messy and disorganized because that tells the story of the character's relationship. During the final edit, I did some color correction to make the mood more cold and dark.
