I recently had the pleasure of working with Skinlab on their video for "Amerikill". The band filmed the band footage themselves with a GoPro. I handled the story footage and editing with their feedback/approval.
This was a new process for me - I'm used to doing everything with our team (typically Freddy Heath and I). We film the songs start to finish, then get small parts if necessary.
The GoPro footage was filmed in small chunks to aligning it by hand was uhhh...interesting. But once I sat down and got familiar with the footage/song it went pretty quick.
I sent the band a 30 second sample of their performance footage with some color work and alittle bit of effects on it (Chromatic Aberration was SCREAMING to be used on this!).
They dug it so then I shared with them my rough plan for filming. They liked and then all hell broke loose - namely COVID19. :'(
The original plan was to have a female news caster stoking up fears and using sexyness to sell guns. Our star, Jason Reynolds, would go gun crazy because he's falling for her and getting them fears stoked up. Once COVID hit I thought it would be cool to work out our paranoid gun guy blasting someone sciency related. (It's deep!).
30 minutes before we were going to be at Cobalt and film the newscaster stuff the actress bailed. BOO. Never gonna work with her again - I had checked in 3 different times that week. Oh well.
James Sweet, the director of Jason Rising, was playing our Sciency dude. Once he was in the suit and had his mask on - we all knew it looked pretty cool. So when the actress bailed we improvised! I had some beakers hanging around in the garage I bought for a previous music video that were never used and we had a syringe looking thing we used for doggy medicine. BRING IT.
So we hit Cobalt and used Gatorade, fake blood, Red Bull, etc. for the intro shots. Shot it slow mo. Then we did the "GOD LIGHTING" - a light pointed straight down with smoke and a black background for the mad scientist stuff.
Filming the story footage was amazing - Jason Reynolds and James Sweet have known each other for a while and considering that we all worked together on Jason Rising it was like getting half the family back together! They both crushed it.
I spent some time on the story and when I sent that first draft over Steev loved it! They had some good notes and I had improvements. A few revisions later we had the final edit locked.
The video has a great response so far and hit some of my favorite new sites:
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