In early 2012 Autodesk’s Gabrielle Friedly approached Tencue Productions and Peter Dippery, a producer that I work with all the time, to produce a piece about Marcello Martino, a british designer who uses AutoCAD. Marcello designs sunglasses and made a custom, or as he says, “bespoke”, pair for Prophet, a rapper and one of the front men of 7Lions. When we approached the band for a music video for a brand new song that we could use as b-roll they said they didn’t have one yet. So, since Autodesk does things right, they said, “fine, lets shoot them a music video”.
Although I didn’t get to be a part of the shoot, Paul Koblik, Peter Dippery and Tom Spingola, the DP, along wtih Julien Lasseur the second camera op, went to Hollywood to meet the band and make the video. Paul opted for a blacked out rehearsal space in Hollywood for the shoot and Tom light the room VERY STARK.
The piece was shot with 2 Canon 5DMK2’s and Paul did 10 takes of the song with a performance track blaring in the room. On about the 3rd take, Prophet asked Paul, “Hey, do we need to care about continuity”, to which Paul replied, “No, think of this as a black hole where crazy shit happens.”
FCPX 10.0.3 with the new Multicam tool was released the day before the shoot and I decided to give it a go. To be honest… I don’t know a better tool for a job like this. The 20 angles synced up perfectly and Paul and I actually had a blast cutting the piece. After a few minutes the technology sort of dissolved into the background and we were just picking shots and tricking out the cut.
I then added light leaks and lens flares via standard transfer mode tricks and also a layer of digital dust on some shots. We also paid tribute to JJ Abrams on the bridge using Magic Bullet Looks. The shakey cam look on the chorus when Forrest, the lead singer is singing, was by way of a freebie user generated plugin that I found online in the middle of the night while working.
All in all, its a fun piece, its a jammin’ tune and all of us at SL\CE had a great time working on the project.
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The original article I wrote about this project can be read here.
And my tutorial on the Multicam Tool in FCPX can be viewed here.