Kyno — on tour with ChiliCake Films

A specialist in music videos, ChiliCake Films was founded by Daniel Lindner and Thomas Barg in 2011. Based out of Gießen, Germany, the team travel the world, supplying concepts, camera work, visual effects, and animation to artists all around the globe.

However, ChiliCake’s remit extends beyond the latest and greatest bands. “Paying the bills by making music videos is quite hard, especially since a lot of filming takes place abroad!” explains Lindner. “To fund these passion projects, we also work on corporate videos, however we try to make as many music videos as we can. That’s our real passion.”

Music videos are a creative beast, however. Getting the right sense of rhythm into the edit means capturing a great deal of footage. To keep track of this abundance of footage, ChiliCake turns to Kyno, managing media across expansive on-location shoots.

Automatic excellence

ChiliCake’s biggest music video to date — ‘Automatic’ — was commissioned by Zebrahead, an American rock band operating out of California. Zebrahead and ChiliCake have collaborated on seven music videos since 2012, each tailored to the band’s infamous alternative style.

The video for the single ‘Automatic’ was filmed over four weeks and across seven countries: Germany, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Australia. ChiliCake camera crews followed the band members on tour, collecting footage from their daily lives over a backdrop of iconic landmarks.

“Just going through the footage was a huge amount of effort,” recalls Lindner. “Everyone on team worked 14 hours a day to finish that video! On a project like that you want work as fast as you can and still be able to put out great quality. Kyno really helped with that.”

Kyno enables you to quickly filter through files, automates transcoding, and provides a fast, simplified overview of content. By combining the day-to-day tools every filmmaker requires into a single application, Kyno is able to speed up workflow with unprecedented ease — even on international shoots with hundreds of hours of footage!

A creative’s best friend

ChiliCake added Kyno to its line-up when the application was still in its development stage. As early adopters, there wasn’t any documentation available, but Lindner was blown away by how easy the tool was to pick up:

“I just played around with Kyno and figured it out right away, as if I’d already been using it my whole career. If you’re familiar with editing or animation software, it doesn’t take long to master Kyno’s interface.”

ChiliCake Films initially adopted Kyno into their workflow as it offered batch conversion of footage, into almost any required format. “This way, after a shoot, I could just leave all the files with Kyno to process overnight, get some rest, and start working right away the next day.”

An endless toolkit

Since ChiliCake’s introduction to Kyno, the further functionality of the software has proven greatly useful. Kyno is now the team’s software of choice when quality-checking footage, from all cameras and recorders, both during and after the shoot. ChiliCake made use of several of these functions throughout the production process on ‘Automatic’, as described by Lindner:

“I really like the integrated player, which allows me to watch raw footage in 60p,120p or any other framerate. Slowing down like this is brilliant for checking quality. I also like to rate my files, so I can select them easily later on. Also, I use the denoiser a great deal.”

Kyno can also be used to tackle a variety of everyday tasks, such as creating still frames/subclips, adding notes alongside footage, and generating Excel reports. “There is so much about Kyno I really love — the all-round functionality is key for me and massively supports my everyday workflow,” says Lindner.

Doing the dirty work

Kyno was built for shoots like ‘Automatic’ and creatives like Lindner: varied, dynamic, and wide-ranging projects with a lot of footage, and the need for a simple, all-in-one solution in which to bring some order.

For studios and independent artists alike, whether they deal in documentaries, music videos, vlogging, film or any other footage-filled endeavour, Kyno is tailored to help. ChiliCake Films, and Daniel Lindner in particular, are very satisfied with the result:

“Kyno will continue to be part of my daily workflow. I would absolutely recommend it to everyone in the business. It feels like having an assistant who does all the dirty work for you.”

Find out more about Kyno at kyno.software