Ava Adore Music Video Speed Ramping

[Christopher Blythe]

Hey there,

Really interested to know the technicals behind the speed ramping in the Ava Adore video. By the sounds of it this was enormously complicated and caused big head aches on set to the point they nearly dropped that aspect altogether. Are they changing fps in camera during the take and then exposure adjusting and changing dolly tracking speed as well as Billy and the actors performance speed. My god. 
 

 

[Steve Switaj]

I got involved with the vari-speed sync stuff about 15 years ago, for a music video production company that was trying to be the place to go for the effect.

We did a handful but I think the only ones you're likely to find online are Counting Crows 'She Don't Want Nobody Near' and Nikki Minaj "Check It Out'. 

Unfortunately, I think the Counting Crows effect is pretty subtle (although watch for the banding in the video monitors), and the Nicky Minage video used longer stretches at one speed and is so layered with stuff that so you don't really see the speed pulls.

We modified an old sync dubber, which was a piece of post production gear, to slave to the tach signal of the camera. 

The Arri 435 can do a speed pull while adjusting it's internal shutter angle to keep a constant exposure, so we could ramp it up and down from 12 to 48 fps in one run. The sync dubber would lock to the camera tach and speed up or slow down at the same time, sort of like an extreme version of the old pilot tone strategy.

With a bit of practice, you could do a verse at 24fps, drop to 12 fps and do a weird bit, and get back to 24fps in time for the next verse - and it would all be in sync.

On the Nicky Minaj video we also had a motion control system that gave us the ability to do multipass where the different layers were running at different speeds, but again, some of it is so busy it's hard to tell exactly what is going on. Check it out around 2:09

Counting Crows: 

 

Nicky Minaj: