Music Video

[Alex Melnikov]

Hello,

I am a long time lurker, and rare poster :-)

Did this music video for a band called Chasing Sundown. Guys have been together as a band for over 7 years now, but never got enough exposure. They are hoping this vid will be something to get them signed with some big company. Another reason why they haven't gone "big" is their budget for promotion. This video has been made with virtually 0 budget and a lot of enthusiasm. :-)

Here is a link: www.alasm.com/ChasingSundown.mov

QuickTme format. Size: 37MBs. Fast server so if u right click and save as, it will take only a few mins to download.

If u have any question on how video was done I will be glad to answer them.

Color has been mostly tuned to look good on TV so it might look a little dark on the computer monitor.

Thanks.


Edit: fixed a little flaw at 0:48 sec and going to try and add some grainness. If it looks good I'll update the original file with a new version in several hours.

2nd Edit: tried adding just a little bit of grain with Cinelook AE plugin. Adding a little grain didnt change much when viewing on TV and adding a lot would completely change the feel of thee vid. When I decided to render it with adding little grain it said that it woudl take 5+ hours so I decided its not worth it for what I would get in the end. :-) Now, I'm gonna play with HUE&Saturation and add some contrast. Then'll put the final version up.

[Dylan Couper]

Hey Alex

Nice work, I liked the eding and cinematography. The colour and brighness were fine on my monitor.

Where did you shoot it?

Oh, just a wild guess, but that looks like it was shot on a JVC DV500, am I right?

The only problem I had was that I found the footage of the girl distracting from that of the band. It looks quite different in terms of it's "feel".

[Dave Perry]

Alex,

Very nice. I agree with Dylan about the girl. The content is fine but the lighting on her seems a bit harsh.

I'm working with a band as well but doing documentary type stuff, capturing live performances. I've never tried a staged and scripted music video with them yet. They are not really interested in doing one right now but maybe in the future.

If you'd be so kind as to review some of my stuff as well, I'd appreciate it.

www.indecisionthemovie.com/clips.shtml

[Alex Melnikov]

<<<-- Originally posted by Dylan Couper : Hey Alex

Nice work, I liked the eding and cinematography. The colour and brighness were fine on my monitor.

Where did you shoot it?

Oh, just a wild guess, but that looks like it was shot on a JVC DV500, am I right?

The only problem I had was that I found the footage of the girl distracting from that of the band. It looks quite different in terms of it's "feel". -->>>

Tnx for the review, Dylan :-)

I spend several days driving around and looking for the right location. The band and the car was shot at Iona Beach(spelling?). Its on the way to the Vancouver airport. Very nice location, quite, only rollerblade-rs and bicyclists. Cars rarely drive there. Didn't have to get any license or anything of that sort :-)

Now about that girl. The original idea was to shoot in the darkness with only candles, but DV500(as u guessed, hehe) with 1/2" ccd couldn't handle that and after I watched the tape with the footage it went into the garbage basket. Being kinda scared to screw up another shoot I got two 3400K lights and shot with them. B&W viewfinder is pretty useless when trying to set up the lens for color, so being on the budget an all we used a regular TV as a monitor :-) As u can see it came out a little on the bright side compared to the beach shots. I will try to play with brightness in post now and see if I can make it work. Also, DV500 has 3 built in filters, so for the beach I had that "sepia" yellow-ish filter on.

This was my first serious job with dv500, and I haven't gotten to play around with the "secret" menu, where I can change color, blacks, and some other factory settings. The cam comes with a 14X Fujion manual lens and it performed pretty good. Still don't have a mic so I can't tell anything about how the cam works with the sound. Good thing I didnt need any sound this time :-)

And one more thing, the camera weights 5lbs (no batteries) and its tiring to shot with it on the shoulder for too long. For power supply I got a battery belt, but its 4X heavier than the camera itself, so I always had a person carying it behind me :-)

OK, I'm gonna go and see if I can improve the footage a bit more, tnx again :-)

[Dylan Couper]

<<<-- Originally posted by Dave Perry : Alex,

If you'd be so kind as to review some of my stuff as well, I'd appreciate it.

www.indecisionthemovie.com/clips.shtml -->>>

Dave, you should make a new thread for your video, you'll get many more responses to it that way.

[Dave Perry]

Thanks for the suggestion Dylan. I had a seperate post for it about a week ago but no responses. I'll try again.

Here's the original post http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=26213

[Alex Melnikov]

Update: Guys showed the video to some TV channel representatives. Everybody liked the execution, but the idea of the girl putting a gun to her head and possible suicide means that they will be able to play this video only after 11:00 pm. This makes it pretty hard for the guy to get enough exposure so we are going to discard "gun" footage and come up with something else for the ending. Should be fun:)

[Bryan Roberts]

Alex - not a bad video for zero budget. What I thought was that the concept was definitely there but to me I think what hurt the video was the editing and lack of material to work with. First off, with the editing, if you watch big budget videos or even smaller professional ones, they seldom dissolve into other shots as this is usually a clear sign of amateur, they will either use a cut or have rapid fade to blacks and then back up from black. The dissolve effects were a bit conry feeling as well like the band jumping shots etc. Also, there were so many times which you would have a LS of the band and I'd be waiting for it to cut into a MS or CU of the lead singer but we never really got that "here is the band see us play" feel which is kinda critical in early music videos for a band who wants exposure which leads me into the lack of material to work with. I understand that you had zero budget and probobaly didn't want to try and set up too many locations to shoot etc. but I think what distracted me from your meaning was that the girl was always in the same place with the candles. Maybe if you had some shots of here walking down an abandonded street or watching the sunset, it might add a feeling of progress instead of just seeing her at the candle numerous times and then suicide. Yeah, abandonded streets and such is really corny but if you put that with candle shots and such, it'd fit fine. I do like your time lapse shots a lot and the shots of the guitar player with his solo as you play with the sun behind him really worked well, in fact that was my favorite shot in the whole video that I really felt an emotion behind. Anyways, I don't mean to sound harsh, these are just my thoughts coming from someone who's trying to make a living at music videos and short films now, not that that says anything about talent level ;) . Best of luck with the TV reps....

-Bryan http://www.DefiningFilms.com

[Alex Melnikov]

Wow Bryan! I am working on recutting the video right now and I will defenitely use your advice. I am shooting more footage to substitude the suicide theme and I wanna try to do the "abandoned street" shots too.

Appreciate you help, thanks a lot.