'Temptation' - Cradle of Filth

[Stuart Brereton]

I've just received a copy of a promo for UK rock act Cradle of Filth, that I shot last month. It had a quite reasonable budget for a promo, and was based around the Garden of Eden story. We had a set built in a large barn just outside of Cambridge, by a company that had previously supplied setworks for Sleepy Hollow, amongst other films.

 

Being a barn, it had no lighting rig, so I had a T shaped rig of tri-light flown from the ceiling, which could be lowered on chain hoists to ground level. From this, I had 6 2k spacelights suspended to give a soft overall toplight. The rest of my lighting package consisted of 4' & 2' kinoflos, a couple of 2.5k hmi's and some smaller hmi's, along with my own tungsten lamps.

 

The director and I had discussed two distinct looks, which I knew would have to be mostly accomplished in-camera, rather than through lighting.

 

 

This is a shot of the set lit and dressed for the 'Day' scenes. The spacelights gave a general level of illumination. I then had 4' kinoflos as keylight and kickers, with a 2.5k hmi as a hard 'sun' source from the same side as the key. The 2.5k had 2 layers of CTS on it.

 

Camerawise, we had a fairly extreme setup. We were shooting on HD, F-750. I overexposed the image by 3 stops, and crunched the blacks down to -80/100. This gave me a highly saturated, contrasty image, which I then softened with either a 1/2 or 1 Black promist. The promist halated the highlights nicely, and took the edge off what was a VERY punchy image. The band decided in post that the look was too colorful for them, so it was later graded with a Magic Bullet plugin to look like this:

 

 

The other look was dark & cold. I had no time to gel lamps for this, so instead I changed the tungsten preset in camera to around 2400 kelvin, and changed all the matrix values to -20/100. I also pumped a load of smoke in, and used a 1 Black promist throughout. This got me most of the way to the final look, which was completed by further desaturation in post.

 

 

There are some more grabs on my website. I'll try to get the video online in the next few weeks.

[Alex Mizin]

Looks great! I'm a bit of a novice so I'm afraid I can't add any other useful comments or questions but I like it. The shot with the face of the woman is beautiful. The first frame grab is excellent also.

 

Alex

[Cody Jacobs]

Was HD camera package your first choice or just something put into your lap by production?

[Igor Trajkovski]

Nice Looking.

Esp the day scenes.

 

Thanks for sharing.

 

BTW, i thing i saw a staged (on stage) video from CoF, reminds me on yours.

I thing it was CoF and was played

more than a month ago on some VH1 or MTV metal show.

 

Is there any snowing in the video?

(trying to remember some details :) )

It was great looking.

 

 

 

 

Respect

 

Igor Trajkovski

 

 

PS: What kind of folks are the CoF's in real life?

Edited October 12, 2006 by Igor Trajkovski

[Stuart Brereton]

Yes, there was snow (and rain) in the video. I didn't know that it had aired already.

 

 

Was HD camera package your first choice or just something put into your lap by production?

 

Shooting film was never discussed, although obviously it would have been nice. I opted for an F750 rather than a Varicam, for quality and resolution reasons.

[Stephen Williams]

Hi Stuart,

 

As always beautiful images.

 

Stephen

[chris caliman]

hi, very interesting, nice work...

greets

chris

[Luke Prendergast]

Lovely work. Brave shooting 3 stops over!

[Stuart Brereton]

For those who are interested, the 'Temptation' video is now online.

 

CoF video

[Michael McIntyre]

Very nice (as always)...... And, again, thanks for sharing. Amazing how much mileage that barn provided.

 

Odd question - I realize the daylight footage was 3 stops over but how wide were you? Also for the night stuff. Just curious with all that dollying how much of a focus-pull nightmare it was or if you just let it drift occassionally in&out.

 

Great work.

[Stuart Brereton]

If I remember right, the barn was lit to f5.6, with the camera rated at 400asa. I then used the ND filter wheel on 2, which is eqivalent to 2.5 stops, to give me a shooting stop of f2.4 (ish). For the day scenes, I just pulled the ND and opened up to f2.

 

We were shooting with ENG lenses, so I did my own focus. The focus marks on ENG lenses are just too close together, plus, I wanted to have the freedom to play about with the focus in shot.

[Rupe Whiteman]

... Lovely looking frame grabs - reminded me of Lord of the Rings. Great to see such nice HD work...

 

Regards,

 

Rupe Whiteman

[Matt Workman]

That is a great set. What kind of power did that barn/stage have?

 

2.5k HMI, 4 Space Lights, Kinos = How many Amps?

 

You did a great job of making a small set look much bigger. I liked the day/night looks. I'm quite scared off the singer in the day scene. Can't watch it again.

 

Cheers,

 

Matt

[Michael Campanella]

Great video ... thanks for sharing.

[Jim Feldspar]

If you want a cold(er) look without gelling, why did you adjust the camera tungsten setting

to 2400K? Wouldn't that warm it up?

 

Also, I had no idea that you could overexpose THREE stops in video, even if HD is different

in that respect - is it? - and get away with it.

 

Great work.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Well it depends exactly what he means by overexpose - faces three stops hotter than usual and light everything else down, (as I suspect) or just let everything go over. And it is slightly clippy, although (and I'd be interested in confirmation of this) what I think he's doing is emulating the very-hot-exposure-on-film look that's standard fare in music promos.

 

Bloody nice; I couldn'a done that, I wouldn't have dared.

 

Phil

[Stuart Brereton]

Actually, I did just overexpose everything by three stops. It looked dreadful, particularly with a 1/2 promist. but the director liked it (?!?) So we had a mild disagreement, which ended with me completely crushing the blacks to get some contrast back into the image. Luckily, the director liked that even better....

 

The result was a very contrasty, very saturated image, with completely blown out highlights. As I've said before, the band decided later that they didn't like the look, and it was extensively graded and filtered later.

 

If I can get hold of some ungraded screengrabs from this setup, I'll post them so you can see how different they are.

 

Setting the Tungsten preset to 2400 kelvin means that 3200k looks cold. I've done this a few times before. In this case it was necessary because I needed two different looks from the same basic lighting set up, and I couldn't lower the lighting truss to add or remove gels.

[Stuart Brereton]

Managed to find an ungraded still.

 

original look

 

and with the magic bullet plugin

 

graded look

[Guest Tim Partridge]

I must say, I prefer the original look. Colours are beautiful.

[Rolfe Klement]

Something we often do in post for a grade without TK is

 

Take the layer in FCP or whatever

copy it ontop

you now have 2 identical layers in your timeline

make the top layer Soft light composite

then add a green levels effect - make the gamma .7 or somewhere around there depending on your scopes

then add a RGB levels and lower or raise the gamma depending on your scopes

 

If you send me a still I can show you - since I assume you can't reshoot :)

 

thanks

 

Rolfe

[Jim Feldspar]

Actually, I did just overexpose everything by three stops. It looked dreadful, particularly with a 1/2 promist. but the director liked it (?!?) So we had a mild disagreement, which ended with me completely crushing the blacks to get some contrast back into the image. Luckily, the director liked that even better....

 

The result was a very contrasty, very saturated image, with completely blown out highlights. As I've said before, the band decided later that they didn't like the look, and it was extensively graded and filtered later.

 

If I can get hold of some ungraded screengrabs from this setup, I'll post them so you can see how different they are.

 

Setting the Tungsten preset to 2400 kelvin means that 3200k looks cold. I've done this a few times before. In this case it was necessary because I needed two different looks from the same basic lighting set up, and I couldn't lower the lighting truss to add or remove gels.

 

Thanks!

 

Something we often do in post for a grade without TK is

 

Take the layer in FCP or whatever

copy it ontop

you now have 2 identical layers in your timeline

make the top layer Soft light composite

then add a green levels effect - make the gamma .7 or somewhere around there depending on your scopes

then add a RGB levels and lower or raise the gamma depending on your scopes

 

If you send me a still I can show you - since I assume you can't reshoot :)

 

thanks

 

Rolfe

 

I use Final Cut Pro a lot but haven't gone far into some of what you're describing. One timeline

on

top of the other: no problem. Where is the selection for "Soft light composite"? Where is the

selection for "green levels effect"?

 

I'm not asking for you to write a tutuorial but if you could just say 'here' and 'there' I'll go into

my 800 page manual and work on it.

 

Do you use DV Rack or do you have other waveform/vectorscope setup?

 

Thanks.

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

Great work!

 

I just wish the video wasn't cut so tight. We really don't get a chance to see every shot for what it is. Yeah it's a fast paced song, but also quite epic, so I would have like to see some lengthier shots...especially so I could appreciate your work better ;)

 

cheers!

[Igor Trajkovski]

BTW, i thing i saw a staged (on stage) video from CoF, reminds me on yours.

I thing it was CoF and was played

more than a month ago on some VH1 or MTV metal show.

 

Is there any snowing in the video?

(trying to remember some details :) )

It was great looking.

Respect

 

 

Well...

 

I was looking after one particular video from CoF i once saw and liked.

No name of song, no lyrics, don't know nothing but the video.

 

As i was searching at youtube and watching various

CoF musVid's i came upon one -

 

Now that is the video i saw before and mistakenly thought was "Temptation".

The night scenes i saw from your screengrabs were thematicaly similar - forest, snow, fog... :)

 

I was a bit confused then: I saw the video on TV way earlier and here Stuart is

telling he did this a month ago! Hmmm... :)

 

 

 

Regards

 

 

Igor

 

 

PS: The video i was look for, the one i had no clue about,

is "Babylon AD"

[Nicholas Jenkins]

Really great looking shoot. I'm going into a music video tomorrow night (as both Director and DP) and this has me a little more jazzed about it. Of course, I have a budget of exactly $0.00, but I really liked that the camera was constantly moving (at least it felt that way).

 

Kudos, dude. :D

[Nicholas Jenkins]

Stuart,

 

I'm getting ready to shoot a video that's very similar in terms of camera moves and shots. You're averaging about one cut per two seconds (though it picks up later to be about 1 cut per second at times) so I'm sure there was allot of reseting and getting the same shot over and over for different moments in the song. One thing I'm interested in knowing is, on average, how many takes were you doing?