Just before Christmas I shot my first commercial with the Canon 5d mk ii.
The brief was quite a quite simple set up, One 10sec shot of a good looking girl getting out of bed and then track/gib down to the sheets for the end text to appear.
The main problem was she was lying on red satin sheets which are very difficult to shoot as you want a nice shiny highlight but if you're not careful you'll end up with blown out detail and the whole shot was ruined....the solution was two HUGE silks to double diffuse the crap out of the light seen below.
This gave a lovely soft key light that really worked with the sheets.
Over all it was a pretty basic shoot but I'm more than happy to how the canon performed under a proper commercial setting
Check out the finished piece below.
Thanks to the sexy Stevo MacStiofáin for the stills of the setup
The music Video for Underworld has just gone online. Directed by Eoghan Kidney and shot by myself and a couple of other dudes around Dublin City.
This was my first adventure into the "High budget" world of music videos...We all got paid 50,000 euro for our time and partied with countless celebrities all night.....
.....or not
In reality music vids are a lets do something cool and spend as little as possible from the record company end so kudos to Mr. Kidney for having a bad ass idea.
Which featured 1000's of tiny led's on every window to light up the building in user programmed patterns.
We shot the video over two nights as we only had access to the giant screens for an hour at a time and had to work when people would be least likely to see the animation running, which ended up being around 12 on a wends night/Thurs morning & 2 on a Saturday night/Sunday morning and I can tell you filming at 2am on a Saturday night is an adventure. I brought a person to watch over my back as I filmed just in case any drunk people were in the mood to take a starring role.
Before we went out we had a production meeting and were given our specific locations and some sample shots of the view of the building eoghan was hoping to get. I loaded up on some lucozade sport, munched me snickers, threw on my gloves and me and Clarence my trusty Canon 5d mk ii Camera hit the town.
Here's an Idea of some of the shots I got while out shooting :
From The Roof Of The Jervis Centre w/400mm Lens
From The Same Position w/50mm lens
Down to the Ha'penny Bridge
Down The Backstreets we're fun...avoiding junkies...trying to keep all the hot woman away from me etc.
Ran into a few fun harmless drunks on the way..he was wearing a fluffy pink hairband with hearts on springs
And back to O' Connell St. in time for the building to be turned off.
I filmed most of my shots using either my Canon 24-70 2.8 L or my 50 1.8 except for the up close shots of the text which were an adventure. I was shooting from atop a ladder with a tripod balanced on the wall of the roof of the Jervis center car park using a 400mm lens fitted with a 2x converter which ended up being a f9 manual focus and the slightest adjustment shook the picture.
The footage is not the most film like footage with lovely shallow focus etc.. but without the Canon 5d mk ii this video never would have happened for the cost. The ability to use fast lenses that let in a lot of light and being able to turn up the iso/gain so high is a major advantage.
For the nerdy I shot all the footage at a minimum of 1600 ISO
Enough rambling from me...I present the finished video.
