Video Thrilled the Radio Star

You have a clipboard loaded up with your shotlist, outline and schedule. Your crew is locked in and the call sheet has been emailed to everyone (your producer or, even better, AD should send this out, including a contact sheet and a time and location for everyone to show up). Your locations are a go. You have the song memorized, and tomorrow is the day of the shoot. Get some protein in your meal tonight and go to bed an hour earlier than usual and really relax into your slumber. You want to be the sharpest motherfucker on set tomorrow. The more I shoot the less nervous I am the night before each shoot.

When you get up, put on some clothes. This may seem obvious, but you will have a lot on your mind and it would be a shame to forget, right? I recommend you dress up a little bit. Not so much so that you will hesitate to help lift some gear or whatever, but enough that you will look good and at ease compared to your crew. These are cues to your authority on set and are a friendly way of establishing yourself so as to avoid any awkward moments. I was a PA on a commercial one time and was trying to introduce myself to the other PAs and went up to this bummy guy and said, “hey buddy, my name’s Ben. What’s yours?” Then I found out he was the director. If he’d been wearing a necktie or even a collared shirt I would have approached him differently, but the guy was dressed like a bum and his production was a mess. Coincidence? I think not. If you are a lady this might be a little more difficult because sometimes dressing up for a woman can detract from the practicality of one’s garment. You, however, will have the advantage of having a far better innate sense of style than any boy director. You can probably solve this issue far more easily than I can.

And as an aside, to those of you who are boys and crewing your shoot up, I see boy-run shoots being crewed by mostly boys most of the time, and I think it’s stupid. You get this very fratty dynamic in your crew that can be tough to control. You deploy sexist hiring practices at your own peril, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

So here are Ten Pro Tips on How To Shoot Your Music Video:

1) SLATE YOUR SHOTS! Before you shoot, take the song into Final Cut Pro, put a timecode generator on the video track, and then export that as a quicktime file. Use this as your playback track. Shoot your computer screen playing the timecode for a moment before the shot starts, and your lip sync will be easy to achieve and dead-on. This is far cheaper than renting a SMPTE rig with a slate and a DAT, and will achieve the same thing. If you don’t have a laptop, an iPod or iPhone make a good alternative as long as you can reliably resolve the screen with your camera. I just use the FCP project that generates this as my editing project when the video is shot. It is smart to put a few seconds of timecode at the beginning of this track before the song starts so that you don’t have to tail slate.

2) No faking it. Your singer or rapper should be really singing or rapping, not just mouthing. It will look way better. I shot a video where the act was mouthing, and it looked very strange.

3) Shoot long takes. Even with your shots scheduled as carefully as I recommended in part 4, you will have enough time to shoot the whole song through a couple times. I highly recommend you do this at a couple of different locations so that you have enough footage to make a music video no matter what.

4) Film a concert as backup. If you can get it together, and your act is performing a live show, it can be a nice backup, in the spirit of tip #2, to film the live show. This is easier with a rapper because usually their music is just on a CD and the timing is precisely the same. If it’s a rock band see if the drummer can be listening to the actual track or a click track of the same tempo on headphones.

5) Get a great performance. Your act may be awesome onstage, but it can be difficult to reproduce this energy for video. I’m still learning this, but you really want to get a super-engaging, charismatic performance out of your artist. This should be your focus from take to take. Unless your video only has kittens in it. They will pretty much be great no matter what they’re doing.

6) Communicate with your artist. They’re performers, so they have a really good sense of how they want to appear. Make sure they’re feeling it, and make every effort to help them get to where they need to be. Ask them how they felt about takes. They will often have interesting ideas about how to improve each one.

7) Use a field monitor if you can. I haven’t yet been able to do this on one of my own music videos, but a “video village” is a great thing for a director to have. You will have a better perspective if you can watch your video on the kind of screen the viewer will be watching it on. Trust your DP, but trust yourself too.

8) Drink water and eat fruit. Somehow most of the directors I know turn into senseless wraiths when they’re on set. I sense that this has to do with them subjecting themselves to lack of sleep and basic nutrition. It can be hard, but pay attention to it. I bring a canteen on set for myself.

9) Maintain your composure. Murphy’s law states that anything that can go wrong probably will. I don’t know who this Murphy character is, but he or she sounds like a filmmaker. Making movies is perpetual problem solving. Learn to expect issues to arise on set and cultivate the skill of confidently adjudicating them. A director on set has two jobs, and they’re both sides of the same coin: making the creative vision a reality and incorporating unexpected changes into the creative vision gracefully. It will rain. The lights will break. The bassist will show up with a black eye. A crazy shop owner will come and try to stop your production because they think they have copyright on the sidewalk in front of their business. Do not give in to the temptation to freak out.

10) Know when to quit. Sometimes a take just isn’t working like you had in mind. You have to balance the importance of that take with the overall goal of getting all your shots. Can you cut away from it? Can you re-imagine it? Being single-mindedly committed to your Vision is nice, but don’t do it at the expense of practicality. You aren’t Stanley Kubrick.

And have fun! Don’t forget that. Be serious about your work, but have fun with it. Having fun stimulates creativity.

Next time I’ll talk about what ends up being the longest part of the process in my experience: editing. That’s in Part 6: Evil News Rides Post.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 6