Music Video: Uncle Andrew - Xaris Waltman [Read Description]

So the way this music video came to be is quite interesting. In fact, it was sort of the small bit of snow that ended up snowballing into my feature film. A month or so prior to this, I was working as a PA on the tv show, The Voice. It wasn't my first time working for the show, but this was the first time that the contestant lived in my town. I quickly became friends with Xaris and her friends and family, and on the set we talked about shooting a music video. I had some spare film left over from a failed project that I really wanted to shoot and she didn't have any music videos under her belt, so it was a win-win.

She had a few songs she considered using for the video, but this one was finished in the studio and frankly, none of us had the money to master any of her other songs, so the decision was made for us. We had very limited resources. We had one 400' roll of 50D film and one 400' roll of 500T film. We also had a super 8 cartridge of 500T film.

For anyone not in-the-know as to what this means, that means we had 11 minutes to shoot in daylight and 11 minutes to shoot at night, with about 3ish minutes to shoot on super 8. We had to choose our shots very, very carefully.

Her song was inspired and basically about a character in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew. So we got to thinking and thought about making this short like a sort of children's book. It seemed fitting to the tone and I had never made anything like it before so I saw it as a personal challenge. We used decorations from my sister's wedding reception as set dressing and sourced everything else from Xaris and her friends' closets.

So we took two days to shoot. One day, it was just Xaris and me. We went into the woods and dressed it up and shot it. It was a pretty short day, but the unthinkable happened: the lens broke.

We were shooting on an old Angenieux zoom lens from the '60s. I had purchased it about a month prior but had not touched it. Of course, when I called the seller he told me to pack sand. It was broken but not totally unusable. It could only focus at certain focal lengths and specific distances. A technician told me that the focus element had fallen out and that it was common for this kind of lens. That didn't make me feel any better. All we could do was live with it.

The next day was a full day. Everyone was on set and I had Keaton with me to help light and set up shots. We worked with everything we had and it was honestly a great time. For the campfire scene, we used mostly just light from the campfire and a 1k Arri fresnel diffused to give some shape and fill. It would have been too dark on 500 ASA, so we had the lab push it a stop, which makes its ASA 1000 but it decreases the contrast. We actually shot the Super 8 footage because we didn't have enough light for the 50D, but I'm glad that we did because I love how it turned out.

We got 2k scans of the film and I edited it while working in Austin on Robert Rodriguez's show Rebel Without A Crew: The Series. I got a rough edit done there and then met up with Keaton back in Florida and we got a final edit done in about a day. We then had the genius idea of making it a lyric video, which cost us 2-3 days of work and our sanity.

You see, we wanted the text to be animated, so we had to combine textures and do the wiggly stuff in After Effects. We had to compose separate video files for each letter and then combine the letters in Premiere so that the words would appear at the appropriate time.

Through this music video in which I made no money, I got lighting references for a scene in which I would use in Wasted Hours and I made invaluable creative friends and contacts, with whom I still collaborate.

Видео Music Video: Uncle Andrew - Xaris Waltman [Read Description] канала The Kino Corner