MUS IC | WA I T I NG FOR SMI TH
MULTI-CAM Director Kevin Godley decided to take an unusual one- take multi-cam approach when shooting a music video UNIVERSE
WORDS & PICTURES ANDREW BOULTER
I have been collaborating with the director, Kevin Godley, for over 20 years, starting on the music video for Theme from Mission: Impossible by the U2 band members Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton for the first MI movie. That was shot on motion control over six days... at one frame a second. Not quite the way music videos are done now! I have shot around 30 music videos with Kevin since then and he is an incredibly creative director, and the jobs I shoot with him are never simple. WAITING FOR SMITH This music video is for a new artist called Harry Lloyd and his band, Waiting for Smith. It was a simple performance video with Harry at a piano in a dark studio. Perfect, how easy could that be? Needless to say, Kevin had something slightly different in mind, and asked me if we could shoot this on ten plus cameras, all in one take. Obviously, at this stage, as in every stage, the answer is ‘yes’, and there ensued a rambling decision-making process involving Lucy Nolan, the producer from Smash Productions, my main camera assistant, Joseph Edwards, Kevin and me.
Initially, I thought of shooting on a Panasonic GH5, as I have used them a lot on car shoots for TV commercials. However, Joseph suggested looking at the BMPCC. I owned the earlier version and, as long as there was enough light, the picture on that camera was outstanding. So that, considering we would be shooting in a studio and I could control the light – and the fact Joseph promised me he could get the ten cameras – kind of sold me down that line. We decided to shoot Blackmagic Raw as ProRes, which was my first thought, but actually took up more memory. Data was always going to be an issue, and shooting ten plus cameras meant the accumulation of cards had a real chance of creating a data blockage at the downloading stage. We decided to record on CFast cards and then use a RAID system to download at speed. CONSISTENT GLASS My next challenge was lenses. I needed to keep a consistent look throughout all the cameras. I have shot some time-slice segments before and, if the look changed between cameras, it could become a real
issue in post. The obvious way to avoid that was keeping all the lenses the same. Obviously, budget was a large factor in this; ten full sets of Master Primes wasn’t a realistic option. So it really came down to Micro Four Thirds lenses. I have always been a fan of Olympus lenses for their consistent look and, with the newer pro
24 DEF I N I T ION | DECEMBER 20 1 9
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