Fabolous feat. Jay-Z "When The Money Goes"

Matt Workman · August 18, 2009

Artist: Fabolous feat. Jay-Z

Song: When the Money Goes

Record Label: Island Def Jam

Director: Parris - www.goreela.com

DP: Matt Workman - www.mattworkman.com

Photo/5DMKII: Diana Levine - www.dianalevine.com

This is also posted on the REDUSER site but I thought it was also relavent here as well in that it compares the RED and 5DMKII under the same lighting situations.

Production for this video was back in mid-July 2009 and it was just released and premiered on MTV Jams as "Jam of the Week" on Monday I believe. There are a couple low quality web versions floating around on the net but here is a link to a slightly better quicktime.

Video Link - Quicktime

www.mattworkman.com/dp-v4/work/fabolous-jayz.html

Video Link - World Star Hip Hop

http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/vide...CQUK7k54i3U2b40

Set Photos

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2084025&id=3702694

We shot the video with the RED B17 with the Nikon mount. Mostly Zeiss ZF primes but I like the Nikon 135mm f2 a lot as well. We also shot B-CAM with the Canon 5D Mark II. Mostly the inserts and quick cut-aways.

I used a 1/4 and 1/2 BPM which is subtle but adds a little glow to some of the shots.

Principal photography was shot in one very long day. Prison, Condo, Restaurant, Exterior. Then I was away on a shoot in Texas when Jay-Z decided he wanted to make a cameo and my AC shot the intro scene. The very first shots of the buildings are actually HVX200 with the FPS hack, which explains the extra sensitivity.

It was a very interesting test to see the difference between the 5D and the RED on the same exact scene with the same lighting. The 5D has a very nice in-camera look, but once you shoot it you obviously don't have the ability with the REDRAW to tweak or shift the colors.

We shot under a lot of natural light in the prison, so super green florescent lighting and on the RED is was pure green. The 5D however balanced it out pretty well and rendered some decent skin tones. This is with both set at 3200k.

A lot of the lighting was natural just because of the time constraints but we mainly filled in with kinos and a 1x1 litepanel.

The RED at 800 ISO f1.3 is pretty grainy compared to the 5D 3200-5000 ISO f2.8. Obviously there is a time and place to use the different systems but you can see a good comparison in the last scene where Fab is hugging his girlfriend. The first time you see them on the deck its the RED, the last shot however is the 5DMKII.

I've done about 3-4 videos with the RED and MKII as b-cam its basically boiled down to using the RED for scenes we can light properly and that have a lot of camera movement. Almost everything else we use the 5D, which includeds inserts, establishing shots, timelapse, b-roll type stuff. Its so much faster to mover around with it and I use the indie-slider with mine and its makes for some quick and interesting setups. My favorite is using the slider right on the ground like a hi-hat.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it. I know its in B/W so you can't compare colors. :furious3:

Later,

Matt

Chayse Irvin ASC, CSC · August 19, 2009

Looks hot man! What were the ideas around going black and white?

Rob Vogt · August 20, 2009

I'm unfamiliar with the FPS hack you mention with the HVX. Can you explain how you achieved this? I wonder if your choice to go black and white was a solution to smoothing out the transitions between the 2 cameras.

Matt Workman · August 20, 2009

Of course Anthony Mandler's Jay-Z feat. Kanye and Rihanna video drops right after this one <_< Heh.

Chayse: Hey, Thanks I really appreciate it. I'm a big fan of your work and lighting style. The idea of black and white was always present in pre-production meetings but I was basically told that they didn't know which way the video would go. Most major record labels dislike black and white and dislike 2:35. I've done several videos thinking they would be cropped and that we framed for 2:35 only to have them cropped to 16:9 for TV/web.

Rob: Making the footage black and white definitely helped gel the two cameras together. Like I mentioned the RED and 5DMKII handle color temperature much differently. The HVX200 hack I believe allows you to shoot at 1-12fps with a dropped shutter so you gain like 2-3 stops of light, making it great for static night establishing shots and the like. The specifics of how to accomplish this are on dvxuser.com somewhere I'm sure.

I think that in the prison the green ambient with the orange jumpsuit would have looked great in color but in the interest of making the whole video feel like one piece black and white definitely helped. I was relying on some of the color contrast to make the shots work, so when you are only working in tones sometimes the shots came out a little flat/dark. We shot from 250iso all the way to 6400iso in a relatively seamless fashion. Several DP/Directors I've shown the video to have a hard time figuring out what was Red and what was 5D.

Matt