Music Vid for Coldplay contest

Ken Willinger · December 1, 2008

Got hired to DP a music video for a contest being held by Coldplay for their song Lost?. I used my Red One camera recording in 2K (the director wanted to do a lot of slo-mo 120FPS, can only do that in 2K). We shot it all in a weekend in the Boston area...mostly outside with temps in the 20's! Small crew...DP, Director/Producer, Gaffer, 2 grips, PA. Edited in 2 days (not by me...I wasn't involved in post at all).

I got called out of the blue for this job from my listing on a local film site. The Producer/director was a first time director who had a small amount of experience on other sets, mostly as a PA. He had a vision for this contest and decided to try to fulfill that with his own money.

His idea was that if he hired professionals, that he could get a good product, and I think he proved his point. I gave him an indie break on costs, as did the other people involved.

I think this was a really good learning process for him, especially regarding time management, realistic costs, continuity and securing locations. We recorded it with about a 4 day lead time...not much time to arrange things. A lot of this was gorilla style, just showing up and hoping to get it done before we were kicked out. That's a good way to loose a lot of money. We were fortunate to be hassled in only one location.

We were not able to record every shot he wanted in the script in the time we had. I broke out 67 individual shots from his script. There was no way we could do them all in the time (and budget) we had. So he had to sew it together with what we were able to get.

The director posted it on youtube. Click the option under the vid "watch in high quality". It looks much better than the low res. See it here:

Let me know what you think. I'm happy to discuss what we did to get what we got!

Hunter Hampton · December 1, 2008

I think there were some mild screen direction issues that were distracting (in the music store) but other than that I think you got some good shots and It kept my interest for the whole song.

Ken Willinger · December 1, 2008

I think there were some mild screen direction issues that were distracting (in the music store) but other than that I think you got some good shots and It kept my interest for the whole song.

Thanks for looking at it. I agree that there were some screen direction issues but I don't see them in the record store. We actually did cross the line in the parking lot scene, and I warned the director about this issue. He was reluctant to do master shots, which would have given us some bearings and we didn't have anyone doing continuity. We were quickly running out of time (daylight) when we shot the parking lot on the 2nd day and had to rush to get off shots. And that was the one place where we were hassled. Thus the crossing the line issue...nobody checked, and we didn't record both sides of the scene back to back (and you can see a big difference in the light). Oddly enough...maybe because there is no actual dialogue and just music, it seems to work OK. You don't become totally disoriented.

Danny Haritan · December 11, 2008

I agree with Hunter... the music store scene felt a little awkward to me with some of the shot selections, and breaking the 180 possibly? I love all the street shots used, especially with the flower guy. Great job.