Music video/cover (The Black Keys - Little Black Submarines)

[Francisco Guerrero]

Hi all! I've just finished my first music video/cover for my band (I'm the guitarist in the video). The song is Little Black Submarines from The Black Keys. I'd love to get some feedback on both video and audio (filming, editing and audio recording and mixing), especially on the second half of the video, as the visual pace drastically changes.

Thanks very much!
 

 

[Phil Connolly]

Good sounding clip.

The shot from behind the drums looks great.

In terms of critique - when the light is square on it looks a little bit flat and you have to be careful about the light position, you want to avoid the mic casting hard shadows on the singers face - softer light would help

Also it you use more back light or 3/4 back light it will give the image more, puch.

And the location seems a bit dark - throwing some pools of light or practicals in the back of shot would give it a bit more depth,

I did something similar last year - its not all perfect, but I like the backlight and the splash of light on the piano and control room

Well more "folk" and more boring, but it was a mostly live recording with just me operating and 2 locked off cameras. I maybe gave the Bassist too much back light, but didn't have the room to back off the light or a smaller unit

[Francisco Guerrero]

Thank you very much Phil, your comments are very helpful.

The problem with the lighting was that we couldn´t use 2 LED pannels we had, because we just found out they were faily when we arrived at the studio... so we ended up using an IKEA light as our main light... ? (which we wanted to point to the ceiling to hit the drummer as a soft light). Won´t happen again! 

I agree the background/location could be lighter... that´s something I had been thinking for a while (since I started grading it). When I watch the video on my computer it doesn´t look so bad, but when I watch it on my phone... completely different story... I added quite a lot of contrast and some vignettes, but I think I might have gone a bit too far! 

Love the light that hits the background and the guitarist at 00:10 in your video, I think those kind of touches make the video stand out. And yes, sometimes there´s no much more you can do when filming in a small studio (we had the same problem). 

I´ll definitely experiment a bit more with lighting next time! 

Thanks again!