Dom Bower Photo Blog: Jack Rowberry - Hide Away

Saturday, 24 November 2012

Jack Rowberry - Hide Away - Music video

Todays blog post is all about shooting and editing the music video for the Musician Jack Rowberry.

More details below

From left to right

Stewart Sands on guitar, Bruce Thompson on base

Jack Rowberry on Guitar and vocals

Alannah Carson on Vocals

Steve Archibald on drums

Alexander Tragowski on Violin

Now this should have been a simple edit. Shoot it 5 times from different angles and then hay presto, just chop and change in final cut pro. But no.

You see, the final track was edited slightly and was the work of just one of the recordings (out of the 5-7 we did) However additional parts like the drums and piano were added in later. Any single string faults or violin or drum beats that were out of time in the recorded track were cut and pasted from either other parts of the song or from other recordings. So the single recording I had, in my camera, would not be exactly the same as the recording burned on the cd at the end. Thus requiring me to edit like a mofo.

And in other music videos where it has dancing girls, location shoots, story shots etc the syncing up of the track is %50 along with %50 getting a story to be told. But here it is all about the sound and the timing, Even 2 frame out of sync on the drum beats becomes very obvious. Syncing up the bits where you see jack strumming and plucking his guitar has to be synced within 1 frame otherwise it looks out of time.

When I shot the video I recorded the audio via the canon 5d mark 2 internal mic set to almost total min volume gain, this meant i got a good clear sound that wasn't blown out or just a whole track of blaaaaaaaaaaaa. (don't know the technical term for that) So i had some reference points for syncing up and that is where the M key comes in handy. Adding markers throughout each recording to specific parts of the song along with marker points on the audio track helps immensely to get it lined up (roughly).

Recoding wise, I had the Canon 5d mark 2 on top of my mini tripod in my harness for stabilization. This meant I got nice floating movement but the majority of the vibration and shake was removed or at least reduced. However when i do any sudden movements or … trip over a cable, there is shake and movement that is destructive to the video so that is when i have to cut to another take.

The plan is to get 1 whole take of close up of Jack,

then a second, but from a slightly different angle,

then a 3rd and 4th focusing on other elements of the band, from the violin and the additional vocals

5 focusing on the drums

6th another take of close ups on jack

Then extra snap shots of the piano and drums again which were synced up in audio during the editing of the recording.

Biggest tip throughout all of this is - Don't fuck around with the camera settings!, choose the right iso, the right aperture, the right shutter speed, the right white balance and don't change it from one take to the next otherwise editing will be helllllllllllll!

While syncing up the videos with the audio, you also have to think about the transitions, does the song require smooth slow fading and cross dissolves or does it deserve more fast sharp cuts. This song was very much the slow and cross dissolves.

The fonts I used took me a while to find,

the top font its

Edwardian scripts - Regular

The lower font is Blair - Regular with added tracking
Personally I like the mixing of 2 fonts, it adds something to it. Don't know what that something is but it is deffo something.

If your wondering about the aspect ration/ how i got the cinematic wide angle look, what I did was just add an overlay ontop of the video. The over lay is just 2 black bar in a PNG file so the white bit is see through. In Final Cut Pro X I placed this at the top of the time line so that it overlays all the footage below. The beauty of doing it this way other than using the Letterbox effect in the effects panel in the software is that i am then free to manipulate the underlying video up or down so it focuses more on what i am wanting it to focus on, ie more of the guitar or more of the face, just simple transforming the Y axis up or down by a max 11px

This was recorded live by Marshall at www.oldmillstudios.co.uk
http://www.facebook.com/jackrowberrymusic
http://www.jackrowberry.com
https://twitter.com/jackrowberry
http://www.youtube.com/jackrowberry
This was recorded live by Marshall at www.oldmillstudios.co.uk
Shot and edited by Dom Bower

Shot with the Canon 5dMark2 with Samyang 35mm f1.4 and 24mm f1.4
Lenses Provided by