Music video shot with combination of Alexa, Bolex, mobile phone cameras and defect digicam

Alexander Kohn · December 19, 2018

Dear community,

It is my first post ever in this forum, that I have been reading since years and learned so much from. I never dared to post anything yet, which is why I feel a little bit unsure about posting my own work in the beginning rather than contributing to the community. But I hope you do not read this as a self-promotion post or so, I just now start to feel confident (or old?) enough to not just read but be a more active part of cinematography.com.

I would like to show you my latest work, which is a music video I directed and shot for the band GiiRL.

I used an Alexa with an old vintage Angenieux zoom, as well as a Bolex H16 and a wild combination of various consumer cameras like iPhones, GoPros, DSRL and a really defect photo camera that creates (in my opinion) beautiful digitally destroyed footage.

With each format I tried to tell a different layer of story or emotion.

I am very pleased with the result of the Bolex, as I bought it very cheap on ebay and could not test it beforehand. It was my first experience with analog film and it was such a pleasure. This forum also helped me a lot with so many questions I had, being already answered about the Bolex. Thanks for that!

I will now just leave this video here:

Would be very happy to hear your thoughts on this and all the best from Berlin,

Alex

Bob Speziale · December 21, 2018

This is beautifully shot, but so well shot and interesting I completely ignored the music. I would consider mixing live shots of the band performing with some of these sequences. Otherwise the subject is the video and the band and music fade into the background.

Alexander Kohn · December 25, 2018

Hey Bob!

Thanks for your feedback! It is as interesting as humbling what you are saying about the video. I wanted to avoid having the band perform in the video and focus more on a sort of narrative-surreal story telling. This definitely leads to less attention to the music itself, but I hoped for a symbiosis of sound and visuals.

The challenge for me in the editing was to find a way to mash-up the material we shot in such a way that it is not too much of an overdose that would be too challenging to watch and to forget the song completely. To me it feels quite right now, though I have seen this now for so many times it got really hard to judge.

But it is maybe something to keep in mind for the next time as how to balance the visuals against the music.

Best wishes and happy Christmas!

Alex