DJ marketing film..."Pulse"
On a recent trip
For this film, I definitely kept it simple. Everything was shot with a Canon 50 mm 1.4 lens, and almost everything was shot hand-held. The lens doesn’t have any image stabilization, but I actually wanted to add a little roughness to the film. The 1.4 lens was also essential for the low light situations I was shooting in. I used the ISO 640 speed to help with the low light and to give the image a little graininess. As for lighting...what lighting? Everything used natural light, except for the interview.
Speaking of interview, we shot that in my basement in Buffalo during Thanksgiving (to be specific, we shot it ON Thanksgiving). I definitely broke the budget to light the scene...three or four silver bowl clamp lights that you can pick up at a hardware store for about five bucks apiece. For sound, the microphone you see isn’t just a prop. It’s the narration mic from my sound booth, a Rode NT1-A, which I ran into my Zoom H4N recorder.
The post production process gave me my first opportunity to work with Apple Color, color correction software that’s part of the Final Cut Studio suite.
Fortunately, I picked up a great DVD training set from Classroom On Demand, which really demystified the program for me. If you’re looking to jump into Color, I highly recommend these training DVDs.
Perhaps my favorite part of the project was the music. I’ve done scores for a number of my films, but this was the first music I’ve done in the electronic music genre (although since I’m using a computer to make my music, technically it’s ALL electronic...but now we’re nitpicking). It was a little nerve-racking when I asked my brother for his opinion (he is a DJ, after all). He gave me some really good feedback on my first version, which made my final version of the song that much better. I used Soundtrack Pro to mix down the music with the interview, as well as add some stereo, reverb and sound effects.
And for the slow motion effects, I converted the footage using Apple Motion and their Optical Flow technology. The program actually invents new frames to fill in the gaps when you slow down the footage. With the dark club footage, it had a tendency to introduce some warping effects...which I actually think look cool.
I’m real happy with the final result, especially since my brother now has a pretty sweet promo film. And if you’re planning to visit the Charlotte area, check out DJ Stix wherever he happens to be playing.
Between narration and filmmaking, I've got quite a bit going on.
Here's the
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