Punchy rap music video effect

[Tom Norris]

Hi everyone,

 

As pertaining to this video:

, how exactly (in specific detail) would one go about attaining the effect of this music video. If you were to be the cinematographer on the video, what lenses/camera/stock would you use, what lighting would be used, and what sort of post processing would be done?

 

Thanks!

Tom

[Phil Jackson]

Hi everyone,

 

As pertaining to this video:

, how exactly (in specific detail) would one go about attaining the effect of this music video. If you were to be the cinematographer on the video, what lenses/camera/stock would you use, what lighting would be used, and what sort of post processing would be done?

 

Thanks!

Tom

 

 

Looks pretty conventional to me. Lots of wide angle lensing, jump cuts on jib moves. Lot of in-your-face handheld work, blown out highlights and crushed blacks, very contrasty. They may have kicked the saturation a little, the colors seem a bit loud and the sky seems really blue. I actually wouldn't be surprised if this was shot on video, it's pretty crispy looking. The nighttime stuff looks to be one big hard source coming from the front camera left, the shadows are pretty pronounced. The stuff on at the door looks like it just might be uncorrected (or someone did a poor job in post and just made all the upper mids and highlights blue).

[Chris Millar]

That kind of slipping in and out of sync, punchiness you see I reckon was done by affecting the audio and putting in silence in the playback when you want the punchy effect ...

 

So, youd playback the track, get your talent to dance and whatever in time then when the silence (or countdown/whatever to assist in the choreography) happens they pause or move/whatever as do you with the camera (or not) and any variation of that ... once the playback kicks back in they dance/whatever in time again.

 

Now when it comes time to edit, ramp up those sections where there was no audio playback to be near instantaneous achieving an effect of an immediate camera and/or dance move still in time/flow with the track itself ...

 

If you think about it its a kind of a single camera bullet time -

 

Hope that makes sense

[Tom Norris]

Thanks for the replies and the insight! What sort of camera/lense/film stock would you use to attain this effect, and what would be done in post (if anything besides just pushing the contrast)?

[Chris Millar]

Thanks for the replies and the insight! What sort of camera/lense/film stock would you use to attain this effect, and what would be done in post (if anything besides just pushing the contrast)?

 

The effect I mention is camera independent - in post you'll need some sort of time remapping function - FCP has it as does After Effects ...

 

As for the look I'll leave that to others to kick about for ya ;)

[Robert Sloan]

What effect are you talking about exactly? Everything I see is jump cuts that would be done in post. Like Phil said, this probably wasn't shot on film but rather on video. Wide angle lenses, a cheap jib, knowing the cut tool in FCP, Premiere, or Vegas, and a little bit of know-how with a color corrector plug-in, and you can do this in an afternoon.

[Chris Millar]

I watched it again,

 

yes, I think I went overboard with my info, it is a bit simpler than I originally thought...

 

That being said, what I talk about is still legitimate and has been done in other videos - but sorry, no specific examples spring to mind - you might do well to note that the video seems to have been uploaded by someone with connections to a motion control supplier (Gato Inc.) - but they could have done most of the moves I watched traditionally, there is no obvious effects going on that need multiple passes.