Conducting a no-budget music video + 5 tips for the shooting days
Filmmaking is one of the hardest jobs I know. Anyone who has ever done it knows what I am talking about.
No matter how meticulously everything is prepared, somehow things happen that are not foreseen or could not have been foreseen.
The best are always the things that hit everything else in one fell swoop.
For example, the location can be entered a little too late, so it throws the whole schedule over. This can then result in the sun suddenly setting, although it was actually planned as a light source.
Or somebody forgets an important part of the equipment, and how much tinkering you use doesn’t matter, because you need exactly this thing.
I do not know how the factor of unpredictability in big Hollywood productions is, but in the no-budget area, you have to make friends with it. Of course, this can also provide positive surprises, but unfortunately, this happens very rarely.
In addition to the organization and the brain work, there is the whole material battle that probably each band only knows too well: load, unload, build, dismantle, load, unload. Somewhere in between then happens what you really want to do.
But no-budget is no-budget and who wants results, has to do something for it.
In the evening you fall to bed exhausted and the brain feels as if you wrung it like a wet garment.
All the better is the sighting of the material the day after. It’s fun when the first scenes come together in your head and a premonition arises, how the whole thing might look like at the end.
But before that, there is still a lot to do and I want to tell you a little about how things went with us.
Filming the story
To distribute the work, we worked on our production of the Brainfuck music video in different steps.
The story was spread over two days. One day for the story-taking of the adult protagonist, another day for the young protagonist. On the third day, the shooting with the band took place.
The days were spaced at least a week apart and always took place on a weekend.
Looking back, the day with Hanspeter was the easiest. We only had one person in front of the camera and we made rapid progress. The outdoor shots were made first because we had to create them in the day-for-night process and thus needed the daylight.
For the further recordings, we had our lighting expert Michael, who could conjure the desired moods.
We even left part of the material in the small room where the bed of the Verdingkind can be seen. That saved us at least the transport of that same bed and various other objects.
During the other story-shooting day, the remembrance shots were made. In the finished video, these are the sepia yellow colored scenes, in which the ugly past of the Verdingkind is shown.
There was a lot more to do here, as different rooms had to be set up and up to three people stood together in front of the camera. But the whole thing was actually quite supple and we had already all the shots for the story in the raw version.
Band shooting
The last day of shooting was then as planned with the musicians. There we had the advantage that the lighting equipment no longer needed to be transported. Of course, since the storage room of this equipment was already in the same basement of the filming, that was already on site. In addition, Michael also had a camera crane available, which we could use for the shots of the whole band. He has been involved in much larger productions himself, but for newcomers, this was pretty cool to have access to such equipment. Thanks to him, we were also on the safe side for each day of shooting. His experience in this area was essential to us because the light is about as good as the special effects: if the work is done well, it will not be noticeable to most viewers. If it’s bad, it catches the eye and you find it inappropriate.
When we were shooting the whole band, something happened that I mentioned in the beginning: A cable that was needed to connect the metronome to the amplifier remained in the band room.
The metronome was important so that later the filming and the studio version of the song would be in sync. As a result, Dani once again drove back into the band room to bring this cable and we repositioned the program. For the shooting of the individual musicians, the metronome alone was loud enough, so we filmed them first to not waste any time.
We wanted each musician to have a different background in his single shot, so the light had to be adapted to each location.
While one musician was filmed each time, Michael set up the lights for the next recording and dismantled the one of the last one.
Each musician was filmed about three times, Miriam as a singer with several locations even more often (yes, the song ran a few times that day …).
At some point, everything was ready for the shooting of the whole band and after several passes, they were done. At the end of the day, we were able to celebrate the completion of the filming and three exhausting weekends came to an ending.
Post-production
I always copied the film footage several times when I came home from filming. After all the effort of the shooting days, the value of an SD card suddenly increases immeasurably and you do not want to lose the footage in any case.
When we had all the shots together, we started the cutting work. Starting with the story, we quickly discovered that we did not have to worry about having too little footage for this part of the music video.
That suited us well because as planned in the beginning, Luki and I wanted to show about 70% of the video story and 30% of the time band shots.
The scenes, in which elements should appear, which would look like children’s drawings, were expected to be a huge effort. I’ve done this mostly alone because you do not necessarily have to be two. Otherwise, one person would have had to watch the other most of the time scribbling what would have been a rather boring affair. Some scenes had to be drawn frame by frame during this process, but these effects were planned from the beginning and give the video a certain unique selling point.
So, Luki and I worked mainly on the color correction, editing, and pacing work together to have a second opinion.
At some point, it became clear to us that the targeted 70/30 distribution of runtime would take away the speed and momentum of the entire video. So, contrary to our initial conviction, we decided to change that so that the finished video would not be too sluggish.
Learning by doing is what you call it.
So the story parts were shortened wherever possible. Every extra second could be used for one of the fast cuts during a band shot, which can be seen especially towards the end of the video.
Such short, fast cuts give pace to the passages, which are more about impressions than details. With band shots that worked wonderfully, in story parts this is only conditionally possible. If narrative elements are cut in such a way, it becomes more of a kind of movie trailer. That does not have to be bad, but it was not what we intended in this case.
That’s how we came up with the finished video, which we were able to improve and perfect with the help of test screenings.
Completion
All in all, almost three years passed from the first idea to the premiere of the video. This is not common, but additional experience has been gained in crowdfunding. Maybe I will dedicate this topic also a blog article. A few weeks ago, the finished piece of music could be married to the finished video and after the last fine work, you can now watch it on YouTube.
The behind the scenes video can be found at the beginning of the article, the finished music video at this link.
Finally, I would like to say a huge thank you to all those who were involved in this project in any way and made it possible.
I think the effort was worth it and the result is impressive!
5 tips
Finally, as announced, here are 5 tips that may make your life a little easier during the shoot:
1. Once you start, stay tuned, whatever happens. Anyone who starts to doubt never stops doubting. And tomorrow is not much better than today. So, use your creativity if something does not work out as it should, but do not stop.
2. Staying on the ball does not mean you have to overbite and want to rip through everything in one go. As mentioned in the article, we also worked in blocks and we had positive experiences. The right balance between going forward and pausing is also important during the shoot, but always stays on course.
3. Send all those people who are not in front of or behind the camera during the shooting, away to another room or to a different place. It can be incredibly annoying when you want to focus on something and next to it several people mess around and distract the team or the cast. Who behaves quiet can of course watch. Proper planning of the turn order can help. Example: In some scenes, all three actors appear, in others only one. Turn the scene with the three actors first. After that, two actors can go home again and are not forced to stay. If they want to stay, they should, of course, be allowed to do so, but as a director, it is no longer your job to keep them happy.
4. By the way, keep it happy: Make sure that people do not lose their mood because of small things. When the food goes out, someone who is currently not needed in the shooting, should go shopping. Also in every other case, if something is not working or someone is in a bad mood, try to keep it still in preserves composure. Do not let somebody scream around furiously (unless it’s in front of the camera and has to be like this).
5. Break the ice. Even if people are accustomed to performing and standing in front of other people, performance does not always work right from the start. It almost always needs a certain warm-up time and to shorten it, you can just show as a director, what to do. Do you need a monkey dance? Then dance as a director and make sure that the person in front of the camera joins your dancing and you rock each other up. The band moves too little? Stand up so that they can see you and play exuberantly air guitar. This may not be necessary in all cases, but if necessary, it does. Give everything for the best possible performance, because such a thing cannot be improved in the post-production.
That’s all for today. Thank you for reading and your attention.
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If you would like to ask me some questions about the making of a music video or something else, don’t hesitate to contact me!
As always, keep your eyes open and stay classy! ;-)
