How I Made a Low Budget, High Quality Music Video
No money, no crew, no problem.
First things first. I don’t have years and years of experience when it comes to making music videos. I’m just one dude with a camera and some software looking to improve my skills and create better content. That said, after working on a recent music video I learned a few things in the process that might be helpful to other filmmakers looking to create low-budget, high(ish) quality music videos.
First off, here’s the video:
1) Gear and stuff
My kit isn’t cheap by any means but it also isn’t super expensive. I’ve assembled bits and pieces of gear over time and right now, there’s nothing else I need to create video content. Sure I’d like that $2k five axis gimbal, one of those awesome drones, an external video monitor, electronic follow focus…blah blah blah but I don’t need them. I just don’t.
My gear:
- Panasonic GH5 + VLOG
- 2X Transcend 64GB SD cards
- Sigma 18–35mm F1.8
- 4X batteries
- Tiffen variable ND
- 2x 160 LED on-camera lights ($32 on Amazon)
- Apurture AL-M9 mini light ($45 on Amazon)
- Koolehaoda Monopod with feet ($42 on Amazon)
Software:
- Adobe After Effects
- Maxon Cinema 4D
- Edit Ready (to convert 10-bit files to prores)
For me, the best thing about my kit is that all the gear listed above fits in my backpack! A practical, portable one-man studio.
What do you really need to make your video anyway? Not having a certain piece of equipment, gear, or fancy gizmo should not be a reason for you not making something (triple negative…I confused myself too). In the past, I’ve made a lot of excuses why I couldn’t create content. The truth is that this reluctance to create is all based around fear. Fear of being judged, making shitty films, or just being shit in general.
“Oh if only I had this thing…this one special thingy gizmo… then I could create my masterpiece.”
It sounds cheesy but knowledge is the best tool you can arm yourself with. A great DP can (probably) take an iphone and using only natural light, create a beautiful, cinematic image far beyond anything I’d be capable of with my kit. I’ve played guitar for more than half my life and I believe a great guitarist can make a shitty guitar sound good. In my opinion, filmmaking is similar.
We live in an age where award-winning films are shot on cellphones. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for creatives like myself to justify my excuses for not making more content!
2) Concept and planning: Think big, then reverse engineer.
With Drown, even though there wasn’t much of a budget, I didn’t want to limit myself in terms of creativity.
Pre-production is a critical component to my process. I’ve learned that over time. There’s nothing more embarrassing than turning up on set and not having a clue what you’re doing. I don’t like wasting peoples time, including my own. For Drown, I storyboarded some key scenes. These boards don’t have to be super detailed. For me, they just need to provide a clear enough path so I know what where to travel. What’s the shot type? Eye-line? Where are we? What do I need performance wise? Having these storyboards was crucial on the shoot. Anytime I felt unsure, I’d just refer to my boards and quickly get that “oh yeah! I know what I’m doing” feeling.
“I think of pre-production like creating instructions for a future version of you, a you that will have no recollection of your vision, as it exists today.”
So help future you by making clear instructions! Here’s some samples of my storyboards and how they translated to the finished product.
Another bit of pre-production was the vfx planning. Although I had storyboarded a shot that included a bunch of squid-like tentacles coming out of a driver’s head, I wasn’t actually sure of how I’d accomplish it. So I brushed up on C4D and realized I could use a combination of hair simulation and wind to animate the tentacles, rather than use vibrate tags and joints.
See below a test showing the Hair simulation I ended up using for the final shot.
And a still from the final shot below.
3) Lighting: Light with Nature
Without the money to light elaborate scenes, I had to make due with what’s available to me. This meant relying on A) two of these cheap, on-camera lights I got on Amazon for $32 each: http://a.co/he27ki and of course B) natural lighting, which is given to us for free by a giant sphere of hot plasma, floating 90 million miles away.
For me, I make a point of shooting most projects at twilight/magic hour. Unless of course there’s a scene that specifically requires a time of day that isn’t sunset. Shooting at magic hour makes a big difference and I’m not sure I can articulate why…but I don’t really need to either. There’s countless examples for us to refer to online.
I simply didn’t have access to the lights I’d need to light large interiors. No big deal though, let’s just shoot exteriors instead.
Check out the shots below. When color grading these shots I used Sicario as a reference. In Sicario, notice how Cinematographer Roger Deakins uses silhouettes to separate the actors from the background. Also, he doesn’t just pick any background. He wait’s until there’s a dynamic, vibrant image to set his subjects against. In this case it’s a stunning sunset. The background itself is just gorgeous, like a painting.
Deakins is a master of utilizing natural light and one of the best DP’s around, so emulating his style (when appropriate) doesn’t seem like a bad idea.
Getting this look isn’t always easy. For Drown, it meant shooting during brief 2 hour windows. Usually the hour leading up to sunset and the hour after. This can add complexity to your shoot. You can imagine how scheduling might become an issue with a larger crew. Thankfully for Drown, there were no more than 4 people at any point, including me and the Artist.
4) VFX
You’d be surprised what’s possible with even a very basic knowledge of visual effects. Whether it’s set extensions, sky replacements, general cleanup ..etc. There are techniques you can learn pretty quickly that will change the way you work and open your mind to all sorts of possibilities.
Having some basic visual effects skills is really liberating. I’d highly recommend that anyone looking to make low-budget content spend time learning some vfx essentials. For me, http://www.videocopilot.net/ and https://greyscalegorilla.com/ were invaluable resources in learning the basics.
Check out the video VFX breakdown video below to see some examples of how I used VFX in Drown.
VFX study: Street tentacle shot
One of the shots I had in mind was a point of view shot from within the car. Our subject, Ickymack, is in the backseat looking out the window at a giant tentacle in the sky. Here’s a breakdown of the steps involved.
This bit gets pretty technical (and boring…skip ahead if you like)
A) Stabilize and track the footage.
The shot I had to use was pretty shaky, so I used warp stabilizer in After Effects to smooth it out a little bit. Then, I precomposed the layer and used the 3D camera tracker built into after effects to get the camera move data. Now that I had a 3D camera I was able to export this as a .c4d file. Now I have that 3D scene recreated in C4D (Cinema 4D).
B) Model and animate the tentacle.
I’m terrible at modeling and I don’t enjoy it..probably because I’m terrible at it. To create this tentacle I started with a bezier spline which I combined with a circular spline and a sweep nurbs. That left me with a very low detail tube thingy. I adjusted the sweep nurbs so one end of the tube was thick and the other was thin.
Next up I had to animate it. To add some simple movement I created a series of ‘joints’ within the Cinema 4D character menu. Then created a ‘joint goal’ by creating an IK chain and binded the joints to the simple tube mesh. Now, when I move the joint goal, the entire tube bends in a realistic way around the joints I created.
To get some subtle natural movement I added a ‘vibrate’ tag to each of the joints and played with the positioning and rotation of these tags. This resulted in some subtle twisting and bending of the tentacle that helped make it feel a little more organic.
C) Texture the tentacle
The texturing was a pretty big part of the process. Rather than try and model lots of detail manually I simply enabled sub-poly displacement and used an image of some muscle fibers I found online as the extrusion map. I worked pretty well. At least, well enough for this kind of creature, at this distance, semi-obscured by cloud and other camera imperfections.
Below, you’ll find a video showing the 3D camera move in Cinema 4D, along with the animated tentacle (with visible joints). The rectangle on the floor is just for spatial reference.
D) Lighting and rendering
Lighting was tough as it involved a lot of guess work. For example, I assumed that although the sun wasn’t visible, the tentacle might still be getting hit with some of that low evening sun, especially given it’s altitude. I also used a physical sky and disabled everything but atmosphere and fog to give the tentacle some depth and sense of perspective. I exported the tentacle with alpha and multi-pass layers but didn’t really need to do much tweaking in the end. Also enabled motion blurring on the tentacle layer so it’s blurred as the camera moves.
E) Final compositing
Now the tricky part. How do I get the tentacle to sit “behind” the buildings, power lines…etc. I used two methods to achieve this.
First off, I need to have the buildings on a separate layer. I copied the precomposed stabilized footage and started ROTOSCOPING. Yeah… the dreaded “R” word. This basically means I cut out the buildings so that they were a separate layer to the sky. It actually didn’t take too long because there were only a few frames that needed roto.
Second, I need the power lines as a separate layer so that they’d sit “on top” of the tentacle. For this I duplicated the precomposed footage again and applied a luma key. This means that everything bright in the scene would become transparent and viola! So with all the layers now separated it was just a matter of some slight color correction, lens blurring and ready to export. I’m pretty pleased with the final shot. It ain’t perfect but given the time constraints I was happy.
5) Color Grading
There’s lots of different ways to color grade your footage. If you’ve read any of my other articles, you’ll know that I like the cinematic look. Typically cool in the shadows. Slightly crushed, warmer highlights and as much dynamic range as I can squeeze out of my GH5. I literally try to make my stuff look like what you might see in the cinema. This is not to everyones taste, I get that…but I like it.
Also, I’m not a professional colorist. I only started filming and coloring my own stuff in the past two years so there’s lots of learning left to do. Bring it on. The 8-bit files grade surprisingly well! but it’s the 10-bit video files that really shine. Thank you Panasonic, you crazy, inspired geniuses.
You can see from the 3 images below the different stages. First, we have the ungraded VLOG file. It’s flat, pretty desaturated and not really meant to be viewed this way.
Next up is applying a LUT. I’m pretty sure I used the KDX LUT from Visioncolor. Even without doing anything else, the footage is looking great. With the exception of some mild banding due to the 8-bit file. (this stuff was all slo-mo at 120FPS)
And Finally, I use Color Finesse 3 in After Effects to do some custom corrections. You can see that I’ve 1) darkened the footage 2) increased the contrast without losing all those details in the shadows, 3) increased the saturation 4) Pushed the shadows toward blue
This next example shows a more dramatic example of how much you can alter your shots.
For the car interior shots, I knew what I wanted. I wanted it to feel like night, but as anyone with a micro 4/3rds camera knows, low-light tends to be a bit noisy. So I shot this stuff in evening light. The sun had pretty much set but there was plenty of residual light left in the sky. This meant that I was able to shoot at ISO 800. Then, as you can see in the images below, I darkened the footage and color corrected it to look more like night. I used a reference image for this too but can’t remember what I borrowed from.
I’m pretty happy with this “night” stuff and importantly, these shots are pretty clean and sharp!
Just like Visual Effects, I think having a basic understanding of coloring is important for indie filmmakers. I’m really only scraping the surface of the colorist’s world but slowly I’m getting to grips with what works and what doesn’t.
For those just starting off, I’d recommend do some reading. Become familiar with the differences between rec. 709 and log files and experiment with some LUTs. There are a bunch of free LUTs online and many people have LUTs already on their machine without realizing it.
Do a quick search on your computer. Search for .cube, .3dl and .look files. You may be surprised at what you find.
I know there’s a lot of people who don’t like using LUTs but when it comes to color grading, I care more about the end result than the tactics employed in getting there. Using LUTs is a great way to speed up my workflow.
For me, I like After Effects because I’m comfortable with it. I’ve been using it for more than 10 years. There are lots of other softwares available that you can use too. The most important features I use are the ‘Shadows, Mid-tones, Highlights’ color wheels and a simple RGB curves. These tools can be found in lots of other softwares, some of which are free.
Youtube is also an awesome resource. A seemingly endless amount of tutorials and how-to videos. My recommendation is to browse youtube or vimeo until you find a video which is graded really well, then dig into the comments and description to find out how they achieved the look. If you can’t find the info leave and comment and move onto another video, eventually you’ll find the secrets you’re looking for.
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