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8 years, 6 months ago - Al Carretta

Hello Shooting People,

This is really an exercise in production akin to a 48 hour Film challenge.
I'm looking to generate some buzz on a music video I produced last weekend.
I heard about a band who shot a video last October...and it's still not ready....I don't understand why the process should take so long so to prove a point, I made this. Here's the video:

Al Carretta Presents 'The Wicked Witch' feat.Luke Dalton & Lak Bangar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJzLUmYF7L8

To give you some background, we filmed 1pm - 8pm (7hrs) on Saturday 21st Jan across two locations, woods accessible on foot, shot until light died around 4.30pm and the good old prepped garden shed, which served as base from 6p - 8pm ish. Bear in mind in Kent last week it was pretty much freezing all day!

I edited on Sunday afternoon (22nd) ready for midnight release to coincide with the planned iTunes live date of Mon 23rd Jan, however, the music release was co-ordinated via 'Distrokid' with admin on this only beginning Sunday afternoon as all digital artwork produced was from stills taken on the Saturday. If you don't know what Distrokid is about, look it up; it's the best value there is for digital music distribution.

The whole project was flipped from start to finish - including a live single release - in less than 36hrs. Refreshments were in house and zero money was spent.

Now, you can't do this without a method. Obviously we had a track to make a video for and the shed location was prepped Saturday morning but lighting was a standard garden floodlight. To film at the pace needed, I opted for high contrast black and white in camera (no colour information recorded) negating any need for rendering; it's entirely as shot and framed in camera bar about 3x nominal pan and zooms in edit. Kitwise, you only need the essentials; camera, tripod, camera bean bags, 2x lenses max. I shot on a 50mm and 10mm-18mm outdoors and brought in a second camera for the shed with 50mm to pair and a single 24mm lens. We ran 7 takes of the song to give me 14 angles and respective pick ups within takes to play with in edit and combine with the woods footage shot first. Obviously you need your singer to know the track well enough to sing with the track but multiple angles make for multiple choices if lip sync is shaky.

So, if you want to flip a music video, be prepped, get organised and don't waste a penny unless you've got it to burn.

Keep filming!

Al Carretta