I recently had the pleasure of shooting the music video for Eric Turner vs Avicii's 'Dancing in My Head' with director, Chris Marrs Piliero. Conceptually this was a very dark & twisted yet comical narrative piece that explored the intoxicating effect of 'the one that got away'.
The piece opens with a night club scene where The Guy meets The Girl and sees the girl of his dreams but can't find the courage to say anything to her. I wanted to keep the lighting subdued, sexy, and fun. My gaffer Matt Ardine did a fantastic job in executing our plan of integrating the lighting into the set, using LED lite ribbon, Par 20's, LED color blast 12's, and party red kino tubes for the architectural lighting. This was not actually an existing club! This was the handy work of our production designer Alex Delgado, who transformed a spacious living room into our club location, saving us a company move! This was my first experience using Lite Ribbon and it was incredibly versatile and useful; small, lightweight, and easy to put just about anywhere.
We used a 1x1 LED light panel bounced into a 2x2 pizza box for our key light at the bar and used a 26 degree leko with a dappled light gobo as a special backlight for The Girl to give her a bit of mystery and really "pop" from the rest of the scene.
We shot the video on the Red Epic and I was very impressed at how the camera was able to hold detail in the shadows in this scene. The camera was rated at 1280 and we shot the scene at a T2.
After The Guy misses on his window of opportunity, he is tormented by the memory of this girl as he tries to go about his everyday life. Our schedule was super tight and although I wanted to shoot all the driving material later in the day, we were forced to shoot all the driving during mid-day with lighting that was not optimal. For his driving coverage we picked streets where the lighting was best - opting for backlight, keeping the background buildings dark. We didn't have the budget for a process trailer so we kept things simple using rags of unbleached muslin, taping large strips just out of frame so we could bounce a little light back into his face.
For our day exteriors we had such an ambitious shot list that the only "lighting" we really did was with a 4x4 bounce (soft side), negative fill, and a 4x4 frame of opal when we got tight for closeups and the sun was just a bit too harsh.
The guy ultimately can't get this girl out of his head so he decides to take drastic measures and perform a little self-surgery, literally removing his brain. To light the garage I kept things very simple. The scene takes place during the day but I wanted to keep things very dark and moody, so I had to delicately balance the amount of suggested daylight with the practical light that I wanted to key the scene with. To create this effect we blacked out all of the windows except for 1 small 1x1 window near the top of the stairs, where we placed a Par 64 gelled with 1/2 CTB to create a shaft of daylight. We used recessed light ribbon to toplight the tool bench and used a 60w photoflood in the practical work lamp which we bounced into a 2x2 pizza box to key The Guy. I always wanted a hint of suggested daylight in frame, so when we turned around for The Guy's coverage, we used an apple box to prop the garage door slightly open to let a little ambient spill kiss the background.
This is an incredibly graphic and disturbing scene and to add to the comedy, we decided to keep the camera movement romantic and intimate, creating a disturbingly, ironic tone.
Toward the end of the video, The Guy removes his brain and chucks it into a river. Finally free from the burden of his own mind, he resumes daily life and goes grocery shopping only to be confronted by his Brain in isle 4. When we did our tech scout, the grocery store location had a chaotic mix of different bulbs already installed; cool whites, warm whites, and off-brand daylight balanced tubes … the whole gamut. Instead of going trough the tedious and time-consuming process of swapping all the tubes to make them all uniform, we used naked image 80's to key the scene using the same ratio of cool whites and warm whites and 56K bulbs.
This video was fairly VFX heavy and we had to shoot three passes for each setup when both The Guy and The Brain were in frame together; one with Jesse, the brain, and the puppeteers, one with just the brain and the puppeteers, and one clean plate. The puppeteers did an incredible job and I was so pleased we were able to do almost all the effect work practically.
