1984-style dystopian Music Video shot on UM4.6K

[Ehetyz]

Here's a new music video I directed, shot, graded and edited recently, for the Finnish punk/thrash metal band RiESA (Loosely translates to Burden). It's in Finnish, but I find it quite interesting even if you're not well versed in Finno-ugric languages. Their new album is a concept album, depicting a protectivist, totalitarian state controlled by a single dictator, and led by fear and propaganda. This gave us a nice opportunity to play with some 1984-like imagery and I'm quite happy with the end result.

We did the video in essentially two days, with one day spent building the sets (the whole thing was shot in a basement of a local office) and one day of shoot. The interrogation room was mostly lit with practicals, with fluorescent tubes on the background and some IKEA spotlights lighting the posters. Only cinema lights used were two Aputure LED panels with diffusers used as fill lights. The jail cell was lit with one overhead 300W Fresnel and a 650W fresnel right outside the door to give us some heavy volumetric light. The propaganda scene was done simply with a home theatre video projector playing a video loop I prepared beforehand.

I shot the whole video using modern EF lenses but with a Cokin P Pastel filter. It's one of my favourite diffusion filters as it gives a gorgeous bloom effect on light sources without eating too much into microcontrast or fine detail. You can see this if you watch the video in 4K, some of the skin detail is pretty astounding imho. And, not to sound like a Blackmagic fanboy, but I have to say the Ursa Mini delivered in spades, again. It's a fine workhorse. Visually the biggest downside is the youtube compression, which introduces banding, even here where the original image has some added film grain.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, and if you guys have any questions about the production I'm happy to elaborate

[Foxtrot25]

Very nice look you went for. Very professional job!

In reference to the banding, did you try the HEVC265 codec to upload with? May help.

[Ehetyz]

Thanks!

I actually haven't tried working with H.265 at all, I'll give that a go.

[StoneJack]

On 10/6/2018 at 6:05 PM, Ehetyz said:

Here's a new music video I directed, shot, graded and edited recently, for the Finnish punk/thrash metal band RiESA (Loosely translates to Burden). It's in Finnish, but I find it quite interesting even if you're not well versed in Finno-ugric languages. Their new album is a concept album, depicting a protectivist, totalitarian state controlled by a single dictator, and led by fear and propaganda. This gave us a nice opportunity to play with some 1984-like imagery and I'm quite happy with the end result.

We did the video in essentially two days, with one day spent building the sets (the whole thing was shot in a basement of a local office) and one day of shoot. The interrogation room was mostly lit with practicals, with fluorescent tubes on the background and some IKEA spotlights lighting the posters. Only cinema lights used were two Aputure LED panels with diffusers used as fill lights. The jail cell was lit with one overhead 300W Fresnel and a 650W fresnel right outside the door to give us some heavy volumetric light. The propaganda scene was done simply with a home theatre video projector playing a video loop I prepared beforehand.

I shot the whole video using modern EF lenses but with a Cokin P Pastel filter. It's one of my favourite diffusion filters as it gives a gorgeous bloom effect on light sources without eating too much into microcontrast or fine detail. You can see this if you watch the video in 4K, some of the skin detail is pretty astounding imho. And, not to sound like a Blackmagic fanboy, but I have to say the Ursa Mini delivered in spades, again. It's a fine workhorse. Visually the biggest downside is the youtube compression, which introduces banding, even here where the original image has some added film grain.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, and if you guys have any questions about the production I'm happy to elaborate

It is certainly very cinematic movie and the story was nice. I liked the ending

[thebrothersthre3]

Very nice work! Lighting is everything. 

[webrunner5]

Yeah that is about as good as it gets. Hard to improve on that from what I saw and heard. Well I guess that's another camera I need to consider to buy LoL.

[Ehetyz]

Thank you for the kind words!

 

I think the Ursa Mini is the first camera I've had in a long time that I genuinely like and respect without a huge string of caveats. It's a great workhorse. I'm trying my hardest not to sound like a shill but it's such a breath of fresh air to have a camera that's not gimped in one way or another.