"Pretty Reckless" music video, shot on 1DMKIV and 5D

[Charles Papert]

checked the raw footage--nope, the sped-up effect combined with the cut just as she was turning around to make sure she wasn't going to walk into the table made it look like a stumble, but wasn't.

[Charles Papert]

Behind-the-scenes of Just Tonight:

YouTube - The Pretty Reckless - Just Tonight (The Making Of)

Some nice shots of the DSLR's on both Steadicam and Technocrane.

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

Thanks for sharing all this with us, Charles. Looks great. Why did you choose to shoot this on SLRs as opposed to something like RED One? I imagine it wasnt so much budgetary, the larger sensor and faster setups perhaps? I'd also be interested to know what picture styles and image options you used on this if you can say.

[Charles Papert]

The first video I did with Meiert (director) was on the RED. Down the road, we reconnected when I sent some stills to him from the early stuff I was doing with Vincent Laforet on the 1D. Shortly thereafter we shot the "Make Me Wanna Die" video at the high ISO's that could only be achieved with that camera (pre Alexa and RED MX). Incidentally a work-in-progress version of that video has been leaked to the internet--sadly it's crushed down even harder than the final version so the beauty of the 1DMKIV on the city streets is gone (wish I could post camera raw footage) but let's just say there's a whole lot more of Taylor in view here. ahem.

http://the-pretty-reckless.net/index...t_from=&ucat=&

Anyway--so yeah, we chose that camera since it was so light sensitive, and stuck with it through five more videos. Meiert likes the simplicity of it, and it is a lot cheaper. While it may seem like these videos might have real budgets, the sad fact is that many videos are being made for a fraction of what they used to and we have to cut corners wherever we can. This camera is a good fit for that.

I pretty much stick to the same picture style: Neutral, 0, -3, -1, 0. Gives us plenty of room to play in post. I do most of the looks via lighting. Mostly I shoot clean (no filters except ND's--occasional diffusion).

[Ivan Jasper]

How many takes do you generally do for a video like this?

[Charles Papert]

For the primary performance setup we might do twelve to fifteen two-camera runthroughs of the song. Depends on how much other stuff we have to shoot. For "Miss Nothing", almost all of it was performance with few specialty shots so that was our whole day. Shoot days are always long, 16-18 hour days.There's no pre-rig day so a lot of time is chewed up with art department dressing the set and me lighting it.