Our Latest video project was to create a music video for an Irish country musician – John Hogan. Like one of our previous posts in which we went into detail of how we produce an animation, today we will show you our process on a video shoot.
Storyboarding – John Hogan: Buddy & Me
As with all our videos, we needed a plan. Consideration needed to be made in terms of a location and cast!! The dog at three stages of life wasn’t easy to find, so in the end we found a dog called Jill that filled the position. Jill turned out to be a dream to work with. A plan was made in term of various shots that would coincide with each part of the song. A storyboard was sketched out with this in mind. After approval was given by the client we preceded to the shoot.
Day of the Shoot
The gods smiled on us and the sun shone as we worked our way down to Loughrea, Co. Galway, the chosen location that one the cameramen had scouted. The house was ideal with an old glass house out the back that was perfect for the opening shots of the video.
We set up using four separate cameras shooting simultaneously. With the favourable morning lighting, we started with John walking out of the glass house. it took three takes just to be sure that we were happy and had enough footage for this scene which as to anchor the piece together. The central character, John himself, to be fair was very relaxed which made things easy. Jill was enjoying the sunshine oblivious to the role that she was destined for.
On cue Jill responded and the rapport with John Hogan was obvious right from the start. It is hard to believe that the shot at the side of the house is their first meeting, true to the song, they certainly were friends and John brought out a great energy from his leading lady!!!
After a tea break and anxious to make the most out of the great light, we shot the front door scene where Jill runs in from the road. Now you might have wondered how we managed the rain? See post production for details. It was then on to the lake to get some more footage.
The lake in Loughrea is a wonderful amenity. Well done Galway County Council! I would encourage anyone from around these parts to check it out. The light was not quite as good thought the sun was still breaking through when we put together the shot of John with ‘Buddy’ by the lake. The main thumbnail for the video was done here.
By chance we came across the scene for the woodland walk when getting back in the car. Not one to miss and opportunity, Dermot got the cameras set up and we added an other few minutes into ‘the can’ (old analog film speak). Geoff wanted to get some shots of John walking in an open field with “Buddy”, so we adjourned back to Martin’s brother in laws house to squeeze in some final shots as the light was fading.
We managed to get a few shots tucked away in the field by the side of the house. Needless to say that the rig shots lack something which we will work on for our next outing. For that we will increase budget on all fronts, beware John Hogan!!! After this we took final shots of Jill by herself lying on the ground playing the part of a much older dog. After that it was a wrap, we reviewed our footage and finished up for the day, ready for editing the next day.
Post- Production
To start off the footage from all four cameras in imported into Adobe Premiere Pro. The song was added to the timeline and ambient sounds found for use at the start of the video. Then began the process of cutting the footage back to placing it in the timeline to match the song.
After the footage was cut together, colour correction and grading were applied. The first part of this was to adjust any shots left in the edit that were under or overexposed. Levels and curves were adjusted accordingly. We used After Effects for colour grading. This is the process of altering and enhancing the colour of the video footage to give it a ‘filmic look’. After an overall look was agreed upon, each individual cut in the timeline were given this look.
Some fine tuning was added by steadying any shaky footage with a warp stabliser effect. Any footage that looked a bit too grainy were adjusted with a ‘de-noiser’ plugin.
Finally we looked at two scenes in particular that could be improved upon. For the scene that the dog comes running into shot from the drive, being a sunny day there was no rain. We added in rain using a particles plugin called ‘Trapcode Particular‘. The blue sky was cut out and replaced with a duller sky to make the rain more realistic.
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The other scene enhancement was John Hogan and Buddy in the living room by the fire. There was no fire in the original footage, so we added in the fire using Trapcode Particular again and using masking and color correction to get the effect of darker room with a bright fire burning.
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When the video was finally done, it was sent off for approval by the client. Here is the final high definition version of John Hogans Buddy & Me below.
We hope this blog has given some incite to how we create our live action videos. If you have any questions or would like an animated or live action video done, let us know, we would be delighted to help out.
