Music Video Diary: Two Days, One Room
Every frame here was captured with equipment that would fit in the back of an estate car. That is not a boast about resourcefulness, it is a constraint that shaped the coverage from the first day onward.
Gallery 12 photos · 1 MB
There is a version of this where we hired a bigger crew and solved most of these problems with money. It would have been faster. It is not obvious that it would have been better, and it certainly would not have been finishable.
What the gear actually did
The edit ran long, as edits do. The first assembly came in at nearly double the final length and included an entire sequence that we still think is good and still had to remove.
- Transcode overnight, never during a session.
- Keep the offline media on the fastest volume, the masters on the safest one.
- Name the bins after scenes, not after dates.
- Export a reference cut every evening, even when nothing changed.
The best coverage we shot all week came from the setup we nearly cancelled because of the forecast.
Notes from the edit
By the third day we had stopped fighting the weather and started building the schedule around it, which is the single most useful thing that happened on the whole production. The full rundown lives on the about page, including the gear we no longer recommend.
- Block the scene with stand-ins while the lights are still cold.
- Set the key, then kill every other source and add back only what is missing.
- Run one take at full speed before adjusting anything else.
- Shoot the wide last, once the performance has settled.
One last thing. None of this is prescriptive. It is what worked in one room, on one shoot, with one set of limitations. Take the parts that map onto your own and ignore the rest with a clear conscience.
What follows is the part that is normally cut out of these write-ups: the setups that did not work, the compromises that made the schedule, and the two decisions that ended up carrying the whole piece.
The bit about scouting in the same light is the single most useful sentence on this whole site.
Any chance of a follow-up on the audio chain? The gear list is there but not the levels you were riding.