A curious tale: Videos & stills ft. a piano in the woods

Earlier this month I had a curious challenge from Andrew Kesler and Aline Homzy – To shoot a music video and cover artwork in a single day. Despite having cinematographer Joel Kesler there to co-direct the music video, getting all the pieces together in a single afternoon was quite difficult of a task!

Arranging fashion shoots in 24 hours or even getting challenged to complete and edit a creative shoot in 4 hours are things that I am relatively comfortable doing… but adding video into the mix made things a whole lot more challenging!

Before diving into the things I learnt from this shoot, check out the music video & BTSV:

Music Video:

Behind the Scenes:

Lessons Learnt:

Storyboards and schedules matter

In photo, schedules are pretty flexible most of the time. If a shot takes a little bit longer to accomplish, you can usually scrap up bits of time here and there from a second shot or simply switch to a simpler shot. In video though, you have a cohesive story to toss together and the ticking clock actually means that the lighting is changing constantly and the entire shot list gets gradually pushed farther and farther behind… stressful!

Optimize your time by shooting both video and photo simultaneously!

So how does one do that? Well, in the first shot ft. Aline and Andrew playing at the waterfront, Joel kept busy shooting closeup beauty shots of the fingers, piano, facial expressions and violin while I got my lights set up around the set.

You’ll notice that you see this exact setup replicated in the music video (minus the lighting and dragon that was hand painted btw!)

If you can, avoid trying to do both in the same day

I can undeniably state that doing both on two separate dates would have made the shoot a lot more relaxing and we would have probably done a better job on each individually. Despite the similarity in equipment (all visuals were shot on a D800E or D800) the need to capture photos disrupts the video workflow.

That being said, there is a distinct cost savings from needing to produce two days in a row and working with emerging artists, compromises need to be made!

Have two separate crews – Photo & Video

If for whatever reason the previous is impossible, making sure you have a separate and video crew can help optimize workflows. Separate sets can be prepared independently. Granted, there will be a lot more down time for each group, but having the lighting ready to go and simply needing to pop models in and out will make things go a lot more efficiently.

Moving a piano around is hard work!

I guess somewhat obvious but getting that piano from A to B was a pain in the butt. If ever you bring a piano into the woods, get some nice carrying straps! 😛

The lighting setup:

Since I know you guys always like to hear about how shots are set up, here are the two lighting setups that were done for the shoot. Sorry for the icons, I haven’t found a program that makes proper Elinchrom modifiers for icons XD