MUSIC VIDEO TIPS & BEHIND THE SCENES

Hey, what is going on? It is a beautiful day here in Berlin and I'm almost done the project that I'm directing here and I can't talk about it. Lips are sealed. It's a commercial, that's all I can say and commercials there's big budgets and clients and competitors so you can't really reveal anything. But I can say this, I've gotten to work with over 30 actors in just three days of filming and I learned a lot from that and so if you're interested in maybe me doing a video about working with actors I can do one. Maybe you want to leave a comment below. But today what I actually wanted to talk about was how to shoot a music video. We just released our music video Harm with Family Things. The video I really enjoyed getting to direct and after releasing this music video some of you've been asking me to do a bit of a BTS or how to shoot music video so I thought I would combine the two and do them in one video and talk about how to shoot a music video, how to do that well and maybe you're going, hey Mark I don't shoot music videos so this doesn't really interest me but I'll promise you there is going to be some information in here if you're a director, cinematographer, photographer that will help your craft. So let's do this! So first off you need to define the style of your music video. What is the genre that you're and there's a couple different genres of music videos. So the first genre is the performance style of music video which is just essentially the artist playing their instruments or singing the song and you capturing that in unique and different ways. Another genre is a story driven style where you might not have the artist perform at all but you're shooting almost like a short film for the music video which might capture the tone or the story that the artist wants told. Another style is kind of like impressionistic where you don't really have a plot and you don't really have the artist performing you just have cool crazy stuff going on and you know what in the end you can kind of just combine all of the genres together. There isn't really any rules with music videos that's the awesome thing. And so once you've determined your style for your music video you need to be able to communicate what's going to make it unique and different to your crew. So you want to create something like a director's treatment or even just a page which has visual references. So when I worked on Harm the music video after I got off on a call with Family of Things with Brad and Aaron I created a director's treatment which is a document which shows the visual style some images the ways I want to create it and it allows the crew to understand what I'm trying to accomplish. See this is so important if you want to be a director is being able to communicate your vision before you're ever on set. Being able to tell people who you've never met before sometimes how you're going to shoot the piece and this is a powerful thing if you can get a group of people on set behind your vision and moving in the same direction the sky is the limit. So sometimes we're so focused on if we know how to use our camera properly if we are doing the latest trend but if you want to be a better filmmaker a better artist learn how to communicate your ideas and learn how to get people on board with that. So creating a director's treatment just a page of ideas and images this can inspire people they look at they go hey that's cool yeah let's try to accomplish that. So once you've determined your genre your style you need to come up with the plot and I don't mean that it has to be a traditional narrative story arc but you need to determine where the music video is going to start and where you're going to end up even if that's just the artist performing. You see you always want to build towards something you need to know as a filmmaker where you're headed because it's going to help you make decisions along the way both in the edit and what you're filming on set because one of the things that I think people miss with music videos is they show all the cool stuff at the beginning and they don't really have anywhere to build in the music video so me as an audience member I don't really have a reason to keep watching the music video because I feel like I've seen everything cool right at the beginning but if you can show some cool stuff at the beginning but then slowly building on that whether it's adding more colors or adding more performance or changing the location even as long as you're adding new information whether it's a new location or a new style of performance for the artist it's going to be more interesting for the audience to watch and you want to keep people's attention so you want to keep building slowly adding in new information whether it's a new style or a new location like I was saying but you want to build towards something. Another quick point too is you want to be brave as I mentioned there isn't really any rules for music videos so it's an amazing time to try some new things try some new cinematography styles cinematography styles that you haven't got the chance to try do something new do something super crazy that you think might fail because this is a great time to try this you don't really have clients on set usually the artists you're working with want to try new cool stuff do it even if you don't think it's going to make it in the music video it might be something you use in your reel so try something crazy be a risk taker. So once you determine the plot and the style and everyone's on board for that you actually have to begin pre-production and figuring out how you're going to do that so we didn't have a very big budget for this music video but what we knew we could do was we could go location scout around the city and find really cool locations or locations that we figured we could make look a bit cooler by adding some things like smoke and haze and so we spent you know about two or three nights going out and just location scouting just driving around going on google maps going out at night trying to find cool stuff and our art director hope little ended up finding this really cool lamp store which had hundreds of lamps in the windows and that kind of tied in with the video style that we wanted to do so that was super cool and we ended up including that in the music video and what you kind of need to do in pre-production and when you're building the idea of the music video is determine what is going to make it different there is thousands probably millions maybe of music videos out there you as the artist or the director you need to come up with a concept that's going to make the video different it doesn't have to be drastically different you don't have to reinvent the idea of a music video but you need something that's going to set it apart so for us with a tight budget i decided to try something a little bit different and that was i bought some picture frames i broke them apart with a hammer and then i glued them back together and i stuck them in front of the lens which created these incredible lens flares and that's so important to know what's going to help make your music video a bit different what is the cool thing what is the style that is going to hold people's interest and as i mentioned before you don't want to show that all right at the beginning you want to hint towards it you slowly want to reveal it throughout the piece so that people have a reason to keep watching and it holds their interest and this wouldn't be a behind the scenes music video if i didn't actually talk a bit about the harm music video and the behind the scenes of that so let me talk about that right now and realizing every time i put my hand down i have tons of stones well make a wish so one of the things we did with the music videos we shot all handheld we didn't really have a huge budget as i mentioned and also too i'm a big fan of handheld cinematography i love how human and how natural it feels and when you have a heavier camera you can do some really cool stuff that doesn't come across super shaky or anything like that and i sometimes think that movies look a bit too robotic even the ronin-s sometimes the movements don't feel as fluid and as human as you would want it to so we shot this whole thing handheld we also as i mentioned put the broken glass filter on the front of the camera and what i would do is we would flash an iphone or a flashlight behind it because i took off the donut that usually goes on a lens when you have a matte box and we were able to shoot reflections from behind the camera which is super cool it made some really weird stuff going on and i love that it looked different we also added a ton of grain in post-production i wanted there to be more texture more life to the image so we did that i wanted to really dirty it up it felt right and i love the look of grain i love that filmic style so those are a couple of the things that we did to try to make the images look different so just to summarize all the ideas here that we've been talking about for music videos number one you want to come up with the style the genre that you're going to be shooting the music video is it just a performance style driven music video or is it going to be like a short film telling a narrative determine that and once you come up with that idea make sure to come up with what's going to make it different come up with that one visual way you're going to make it stand out from other music videos and then if you're the director make sure that you come up with some sort of visual style reference page or a director's treatment so everyone knows what you're trying to accomplish even if it's just a vimeo link to another or youtube link loops to another music video saying hey let's try to do it like this but do it better or do it a bit different it gives people an idea of what you're trying to accomplish and once you've done that you got to shoot the dang thing try something new again i was saying be a risk taker be bold on set don't be safe try something new and crazy and make sure that when you're shooting your performances that you have all your sync markers and that you either are shooting an ipad with time code so you can sync it up later or that you have some sort of sync marker in the audio track so that you're not wasting all this time in post-production but i hope that helps maybe put some links to music videos that you guys have shot let me know what you want me to do next for my videos i think i'm going to be doing a video coming up about working with actors and i want to do also another video about cinematic tips because i think a lot of youtubers out there don't get that right and i'll talk about that in the next video but anyways hope you enjoyed this see you guys on the next one i gotta get back to canada i've been here in germany for quite some time looking forward to getting back to my cat and my wife but we'll see you guys in the next one