Holy Zoo Scrawler Music Video Completed!
 

I thought I'd post our completed music video here and see what anyone thinks of it since we're very cloudy in the brains now. We shot in 4 days, with a lot of pre-production and mucho post as well. Grueling work, lotta personal $$$, but lots of fun!

Both the music and video are original creations.

500kbs and 1500kbs versions:

http://www.holyzoo.com/media/video/H...ler_500kbs.mov
http://www.holyzoo.com/media/video/H...er_1500kbs.mov

Cheers!

-steev
www.holyzoo.com

EXCELLENT work! I really enjoyed this. Very good lighting and
feel to the whole piece. Looked totally professional to me!

Nice lighting and editing.
Dude- just a little "dark" for me- mood wise. Prozac?
Music was great.

Nicely done overall.

Jeff P

That was awesome. Did you use the mini35 on that? The video looked great, the music was awesome... Lots of production value in both...

:) :) :)

Thanks for the good words guys! I used a GL1 on the first 2 days of shooting, and was disappointed with the results, so I purchased an XL2 with 16X Manual lens (with Century Wide adapter here and there) and shot the rest on the 3rd and 4th days about one month later. The GL1 footage was Twixtor'd to 24p in After Effects and scaled up to match the XL2 16:9 24p. Then all finished in Final Cut Pro HD in DV50. I had been working on my home-brew mini35 leading up to the final shoot days but didn't have it ready in time. My thoughts are that I wasn't hurt too much by the lack of the 35mm with this style/genre.

I'm looking forward to doing a project less dark, less fast cuts, and shoot with the 35mm adapter for longer holding shots, etc. Question is do I shoot solely with the 35mm adapter? Or mix up the footage? I guess some people with experience with the P+S unit could shed light on workflow.

Also, Magic Bullet Editors rocks!

I think it looked awesome... You used Magic Bullet Editor? Awesome, I haven't bought that yet (I was trying to decide between that and the full Suite version). It looked terrific... I say, definitely mix the footage... Not every shot is going to need shallow focus. Citizen Kane was shot in very deep focus for the most part. So are who are you in the video? Or did you just shoot it? Anyways, I loved the horror motif and the Forbiden Plantet reference... awesome.

Thanks again. Magic Bullet in Final Cut Pro was great although very very slow. Their film damage effects are among the best as well. Only greater thing might be Tinderbox for AE?

Good to hear the notion of mixing footage with the 35mm.

I'm the main creepo dude throughout the thing. It was very challenging to be the main character and also be one of the main directors. My drummer Kenny Pardo was the other half to 60% effort on all this. And thankfully my good friend Pasquale came in to shoot the full band shots. So we had 3 people behind the camera at differering times.

The worst part of the entire process --> removing the black grease makeup off my being (it took an hour and a half). :|

main creepo dude--!
 

Steev, which Century wide adapter did you shoot with?

John, I bought the .6x Wide Angle Adapter from Adorama.com (Half the price of the .7x with zoom-through). I don't see it on their website now though.

It's available through ZGC though.
http://tinyurl.com/4znxo

It's the one at the bottom - VS-06WA-MXL

I wasn't too happy with how you need to focus it by going into Macro mode and calibrating focus by eye. On the GL1 I was used to just going wide, and throwing on a wide angle converter and call it done (in focus).

The video was awesome. I was blown away by the quality of work done with it.
I'm also a major fan of that disturbingish style.

I am confused...are you part of the band or what?

If you were paid to do this video what was the budget?

Keep up the excellent work!!!

Purely on the imagery this is a solid piece of work. I loved it; visual eye candy forever. Great work. I look forward to seeing what else you do.

The song was so bad I had to turn it off (volume) midway through however; can you say dissonant with a Capital D ?

Brandon, I'm the lead singer, guitarist, recording engineer, etc. When my drummer and I set out to make the video, it was clear that I was to be the main character. It made for a challenging time. The budget besides the investment in the XL2 was about $2000 for props, expendables, lighting rental, etc. There was no paid talent or crew.

John, the song was created about 7 years ago actually, right before finishing college - not a cheery time. But then again I've always been into dark music. I appreciate your honest criticism though. We had access to a condemned building (an old tile factory) and decided that song would inspire the most intense project.

Here's something more melodic. :)

http://www.holyzoo.com/media/audio/s...hat_A_Life.mp3

Well, you did'nt ask my opinion on the actual music :P Yeah, anytime I hear dissanance my ears and brain collide in a bad way; I love everything from The Cramps to Rage to The Beatles and to The Cure. I remember Alice in Chains (ONe of my all time favorites) released a song once that had the 'bad diss' going on in the chorus (I think the title was Heaven Beside You?). It pains me.

Regarding the MP3 "What a Life?" yeah; that's what I'm talking about. That's a kick ass song. Nice.

the link doesn't work

yup
 

yup you need to fix the link i tried it last night and right now. not working.

I requested an edit to fix the links. I've been restructuring the site. Here are fixed links.

http://www.holyzoo.com/media/video/h...ler_500kbs.mov

http://www.holyzoo.com/media/video/h...er_1500kbs.mov

steev

Wow that was incredible. Loved every last bit of it. I noticed you said you used Twixtor to convert to 24p... I've been messing around with the program myself and haven't had much luck. Is there any tips, advice or links you could share for the twixtor to 24p conversion. Thank you again, the video was very inspiring.

Thanks for the good words Will.

I used Twixtor to convert footage shot at 30fps on a Canon GL1 camera in frame mode, to 24fps. Ideally they say to shoot in interlaced mode, not frame mode, but I hate interlaced with a passion by now. So, I placed the 30fps footage (actually 29.97fps) in an After Effects comp at a frame rate of 29.97. Call that comp (Pre-Comp) and make sure it's long enough in duration to cover how much you're wanting to slow down, like 2X slow should be in a comp at least 2X as long as the clip duration. Now place that Pre-Comp in a new comp called Final Comp at a frame rate of 23.98. Apply Twixtor as an effect to the Pre-Comp.

Now in Twixtor, there are two settings, input and output frame rate. The input frame rate is 29.97. The output frame rate is 23.98. You can adjust the speed via the Twixtor parameter "Stretch/Speed" - The greater the number the slower the footage. Using Motion Vectors can achieve morphing between frames to achieve a smoother look. However, this can also result in strange looking footage depending on how much variation there is from frame to frame. Twixtor Pro enable a lot of custom manipulation of Motion Vectors, but I haven't gotten that far into it. I think all other parameters can be left at default, or you can experiment with them and see what they do.

On one shot I used Twixtor twice. Once to slow down the footage without motion vectors, then ran it through again, WITH motion vectors. It's the shot after the baby drops (in black and white).

If you have shots specifically planned for slow motion. Interlaced is probably the best way to go since you can essentially treat the footage as if it was shot at 60fps. It requires another plugin - FieldsKit. I didn't do this on any of the footage.

Here's an excellent tutorial on doing this and other tweaking with Twixtor:

http://www.creativecow.net/articles/...iew/index.html

p.s. You can also use Twixtor in Final Cut Pro, the process is different, but doable. I used Twixtor a few times right in Final Cut as well.

Thank you for taking the time and writing all of that, it was very-very helpful! One last question, when you are going through that twixtor process you described at the end how did you render it. Did you use the comps frame rate of 23.98, or did you apply some sort of Pulldown... thank you so much for all your help!

I rendered straight out at 23.98, and rendered to DV50 codec. Uncompressed would've been even better, but I was happy to be able to edit without rendering.

Steev, Great stuff! I like the music, the shooting, editing and great costumes! Pardo is great on drums. The funky stick-ish bass is a prop, right?

My one complaint is the solo shots of you, looks like in front of a green screen, where there are multiple Steevs. It screams video and looks cheesy which really takes away from the atmosfear of the creepy location shots before and after it.

Other than that, hats off, top notch suff!

Mark, thanks for the good words - they mean a lot. The stick-ish bass is definitely a prop. :) Scott Chavez built that among many other gadgets and stage stuff.

I take the one complaint you have in a great way. It confirms my intention succeeded, at least on the level of "getting" that stupid old video look that has historically been a big thing in music videos. The most optimistic view I had during production was that it's homage to that style, and presents a shade of comedy and destruction of seriousness, amidst all the darkness and "atmosfear" <- Man! that is a great term! We've always had a big circus freak style to us, and that part was pretty much basking in it with no shame, and a chance to throw some homegrown motion graphics crap in there too. :)

Here's the other side to it (reality!). We ran out of time to do our intended shot - walking down hallway, while dragging the chick through a crowd of gimpy weirdos off to the side, separately lit, with closeups of those freaks doing some wacked out things. Green screen to the rescue!

Bring out the Gimp.

Ah, I see. Sh*t happens, good save. Keep 'em coming.