Dependentium - Narttu: FX heavy music video shot on Ursa Mini

Ehetyz · February 14, 2018

So a while ago I was offered to direct and DP a music video for the black metal band Dependentium. They didn't want to go the usual BM "woods and corpse paint" video route, but instead wanted a video that would not include the band themselves and would instead be story based - and extremely bloody. I used this as an opportunity to do a bit of a splatterpunk homage, as it's a literary genre I'm fascinated by but it thematically usually falls on the fringe of acceptability. This time that wasn't an issue, so we went all out.

The video is very obviously NSFW - and not for the faint of the heart. For best results I'd suggest watching at 1440p or higher, because on lower resolutions all the film grain disappears and you're left with just a lot of banding.

I shot the whole thing with an Ursa Mini 4.6K, in Raw 4:1 4.6K60p. Shooting in mainly slow motion posed a major challenge because outside of the hallway scenes I wanted to stick to very small light sources. We used very little usual cinema lights in this, there was one CCT 650W firestarter in the hallway scene and we had two Aputure Amaran panels as backups on standby but ended up using them in only one shot.

Instead we shot everything using a whole bunch of various E14 and E27 light bulbs and led spots, even a bunch of small IKEA clamp spots. I wanted the video to have a dingy and grimy look to it, so we lit with a lot of uneven led bulbs with various unclean tints to get a sickly green look to the torture room. We had an autopole stuck above the set and we hooked a whole bunch of leds on that, then had a few more on stands on the sides to give us a little bit of boost when necessary. We also used real candlelight to paint contrasting warm spots on the background, and boosted that with E27 flame flicker leds. They had a little intense red hue, but other than that the effect is pretty convincing and I was happy with how they worked.

We built the lights to essentially work as a 360 degree set. This was due to the fact that we had an extremely tight schedule. We had one day to do the whole video, from setbuilding to wrap, and in that one day there were 80 shots to get - 40 of them physical FX shots that required prep. So we couldn't do shot-specific light for most shots - instead we had the 360 degree set with a few booster lights and a bounce. I think we managed to pull it off.

To give the sensor enough light for slow motion, I stuck to large-aperture lenses. I would've loved to shoot completely with vintage glass, but those would've required double the amount of light. So I mainly ended up using the Sigma 30/1.4, Pentax Super-Takumar 50/1.4 (the one with thorium, yay!) and a Samyang 85/1.4. Wide f*ing open, obviously :D

I graded the whole thing in Resolve - and on that note, I love how easily the Ursa Mini image grades. Compared to the BMCC it's a bliss to work with. I used a very light film emulation and did the rest by myself, gave the highlights a bit of a glow and softened the image to give it a little bit of an 80's italian gore flick feel.

That's all I guess, I'm personally very happy with the end product. I hope you guys like it!