Music Video: Run CMD - My Adidas are F**cked

In this section labelled June, will be the area of my blog that is dedicated to my work with Robert Sanchez on his music video; I was to be Camera, D.O.P and Lighting for the project; what I was looking to achieve personally from this project was to create another music video that was completely different from the one that I had made with Crooked Brow Productions, also it was a project that Rob was in full charge of and had a clear mind set as to what and where we were to shoot the video, which I thought I would gain good experience with working for someone else under their timescale and vision; i.e. producing a product to meet a clients needs.

Synopsis for the Music Video

Below here is the synopsis that Rob wrote for his idea behind the video that he wanted to make.

Rap supergroup RUN CMD star in the video for "My Adiidas are fucked"The group in reality are a live elecronic act made up of djs and producers from the gabba scene, visually we jump back and forth from the 80's to the 90's with an obvious rip on Run DMC and old skool rap vibe although we're also veering on 90's gangster rap, kinda like Run DMC if they weren't so clean cut anymore! We have about 5 actual members - Dj Contort, Hip.P, Dj Ex-S, Dj Assassin and Mc Tricky (as well as two robots who are mc's of sorts!) a posse is required for one scene however so I'm er - recruiting one currently! There will be no rapping or need for lip syncing as it is an instrumental track, so basically we just need to look good!

Shot in the style of 90's hip hop videos - posse shots - (no no, I know that sounds rude) scenes quickly cuts from location to location as different sections of the track play out, lots of hand gesturing, gang signs, pouring out liqour, throwing dice and piles of money on the floor, slamming dominoes, running away from the cops) 

Research: Cher Lloyd - Swagger Jagger

Rob showed me the beginning of this music video as he wanted to replicate this opening 15 seconds for his music video; after studying each shot, I felt that we could try and replicate this opening scene with the Merlin Steadicam; though it would be very difficult as I've not had much time to practice with the Merlin as of yet, so it could pose quite a challenge come shoot day.

Research: NWA - Quiet on Tha Set

This group Rob mentioned was one of the standout groups that he grew up listening to and that the cover photo for the album "Straight Outta Compton" had really stuck with him over the years, I listened to the track whilst looking at the front cover and thought that this would be a scene that we could easily replicate through me lying down on the ground and using my Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens; which would look very cool; the posse could even perform a beat down which could really add to the homage/parody of the music video to old skool Hip Hop. What I find visually strong within this still is the power that the group seem to express upon its audience and even looking back at 'Fly By' video; this seems to be something that Hip Hop makes overly prominent, expressing raw power throughout their videos and building up their characters as tough guys. Given the appearance of Run CMD this portrayal of strong aggressive power over the audience should work really well as being funny whilst still staying true to the roots of Hip Hop without mocking it or making fun of the genre as that's certainly not the intent.

Research: Fly By

As part of my research Rob sent me a link to this music video for reference for how he would like his parody of the genre to come across; what really struck me from watching this music video was the kinetic energy that the camera movement seemed to generate throughout the video; this is something that I will look to bring into the video from Run CMD; hopefully I will be able to get a lot use out of the Merlin Steadicam for a large part of our shooting days. The other thing that really stood out to me in this video was how up close and personal the artists seemed to like to get to the camera, this is something which I will make sure we film as it seems to be a staple within the genre and wouldn't seem quite right if we shot this music video without some of the crew from Run CMD getting right up in the grill of the audiences watching.

Cast & Crew

Crew

Director/Producer - Rob "Dj Contort" Sanchez
Assistant Director - Robert "Bob" Brice
Camera/D.O.P/Lighting- Ricky Everett / Joe Tippet
Wardrobe/props/location manager - Rob "Dj Contort" Sanchez
Editing - Rob Sanchez, Joe Tippet and Bob Brice
Colour correction - Brent Zilwood.

Cast
RUN CMD:

Rob "Dj Contort" Sanchez
Luke "Dj Ex-S" Bowers
Dave "Dj Assassin" Macallum
Hip.P

Extras - Posse:

Jo Pickering
Alex Littleboy
Piers
Bob Brice

Location Recce

Early in the project Rob had been doing his own recce shoots looking for locations that would be best suitable for the music video; he uploaded some still onto Facebook for me and Joe to look at, to see what he had in mind for the shoot, soon afterwards me and Joe joined Rob on a Recce shoot around the City Centre on a couple of occasions to finalize the locations for the actual shoot days.

Car Park in Stonehouse 

Opposite the Job Centre, if framed correctly could be made to look like a high rise building, much like New York.

Dingy looking area, near local Car Park, very inkeeping with the Hip Hop style. 

North Hill, shoot here for our stoop scene, again trying to keep that Hip Hop visual style and locale for the music video.

Outside Voodoo Lounge, possible posse gathering scene.

Pedestrian Subway close to City Centre, ideal for Steadicam shot of Run CMD.

Voodoo Lounge; we as a group will be going there for lighting tests, with Run CMD performing live there soon after, which me and Joe will record, which will make it into the Music Video.

Shooting Schedule

Below is the shooting schedule as arranged by Rob Sanchez.

18/1/12 - Test shoots for lighting. Locations - live performance @ The Voodoo Lounge / Night shot in graffiti ally way. 

25/1/12 - Test shoots in daytime and night time. Locations - graffiti ally way, city rooftops, shitty run down alleyway, fire escape stairs on outside of building, king street. Lazer test with Luke.*

*meet at 11am at the ERC for the day test then meet at 8:30pm at contort HQ for the night test.

30/1/12 - RUN CMD live performance at the Voodoo Lounge, clips to be featured in the final video.*

*meet at the voodoo lounge at 6:30pm to debrief and prepare.

5/2/12 - Shooting the "posse" scene at the graffiti wall located at Manor Gardens, Stonehouse.11am meet at my house (26 Adelaide St, Stonehouse) wardobe allocation followed by walk to graffiti wall taking approx 1 minute. we will set up the lighting and I will allocate props and accessories and then run you through each shot as we do them, it will be fun!We will have to try and be quick and aim to get as much done as possible, I have no idea what the weather will do at this stage but I intend to keep a close eye on it.

12/02/12 - shooting all other scenes with Run Cmd, rooftops in city centre, north hill stoop, western approach subway, voodoo/ money centre precinct, Cher Lloyd intro sequence, jobcentre/uptown New York scene.

Test Footage

The above is some test footage that I shot with an 8mm Fish Eye lens; which seems to be quite a popular look that appears in the Hip Hop genre; once we watched the footage back, Rob mentioned that he really liked the effect of the fish eye but wasn't too keen on the visible black curves bending the image; I mention that we could digitally zoom in on the image in post, but Rob was concerned that we might lose quality and cut off parts of the footage that he wanted in the final cut of the music video; I mentioned that I had a fish eye lens adapter that I could attach to some of my prime lenses that would given a variation of the fish eye effect without having the black curves in the footage.

Voodoo Lounge Recce

A few days before Run Cmd are due to perform at Voodoo Lounge as part of a Cafe Concrete event, me and Joe went with Rob to Voodoo Lounge to look at the lighting within the upstairs area; Rob also went through with us how the set up of the event was going to be; and with only me and Joe as camera operators, we made a plan that Joe would stand behind the set filming Run Cmd from there whilst they were playing their set and I would be free to roam the main floor space trying to capture as much footage as possible with various different angles; and to help getting something other than handheld footage we would bring and use a fig rig to vary up our options on set. From doing some quite tests with our Canon 550D's we found out that there was a colour light that was interfering with our images, giving us really bad interlacing issues when stood directly in it's sight, we made note of this; and planned to make sure that this light was turned off during Run Cmd's set.

Still from our tests in Voodoo Lounge, with Rob playing the song through laptop and discussing future plans for the music video with Bob Brice.

Run Cmd Live at Cafe Concrete

Above is the video that me and Joe shot whilst Run Cmd played out Cafe Concrete; it wasn't planned prior to the shoot on the day, but Rob found that once he got all the footage back onto the hard drive that he was able to edit together a video with all the live audio recorded there on the night. This is the video that Rob edited together with a small amount of this footage we be included in the final edit of the music video.

This was actually quite a difficult shoot, as we only had the one chance to capture the footage there and then on the night and had to pay close attention to the performance to try and capture the best bits from Run Cmd's performance; I experimented with different camera angles and camera movements with the fig rig and tried to capture just as much close ups as well as the group themselves. I was given free reign on what and how to film on the night and I think that between myself and Joe we captured some really good footage and you can see in the video above that Rob has edited it really does work as a stand alone video of a live performance of the track very well.

Posse Shoot (05/02/12)

Today's shoot was all about the posse scenes that we were shooting down at a car park in Stone-house, much of today was very much improv, by all those involved we tried to make as much use out of the Merlin Steadicam as possible, but whilst also getting the key shots that we had already decided were needed for the music video. First I set up a wide angle lens in front of the graffiti wall with Run Cmd stood directly in front and got them to pose for the static shot and then we added some extra movement, looking back at that Hip Hop style of power and authority over the audience, so I had Rob and another member stand in front of the rest of the posse and got them to move towards the camera and really get up in the face of the audience. The next key shot was the 'beatdown' scene which was reference/homage to N.W.A; this involved me lying down on the floor shooting directly upwards with a wide-angle lens as the posse gathered around a pretended to beat down on me at the camera; this shot was quite difficult to frame as I wanted to get the camera as low to the ground as possible, but also giving me enough space to see the LCD display so that I could frame and direct the posse as to where they needed to be to get the desired framing.

The rest of the days shoot involved the use of the Merlin Steadicam which me and Joe both used, though it was quite a challenge as we hadn't had too much time to practice with it; and also I made use of a fish-eye lens adapter to get some fish-eye style shots without having the black curves in shot, again this style is something that really suits the Hip Hop scene.

Still of Rob getting in the face of the camera.

Beatdown shot, reminiscent of the N.W.A album cover. 

Wide angle shot of group and their posse, against the graffiti in background.

Last Shoot Day (12/02/12)

For our last day of shooting, the day was split up into two halves with the first half of the day used to capture the rest of the shots that we required that could be filmed during the daylight; this involved the 'rip off' scene from the Cher Lloyd video, this was a very diffucult shot to get as I had to use the Merlin Steadicam to get the desired look and camera movement for the shot, but with this being filmed outside and right amongst the elements, it was actually quite hard to balance the Merlin correctly and some of the camera movements that I needed to perform with the Merlin were actually very tricky (i.e. starting very low down to the ground whilst following a crew member walking forward, rising the Merlin and finishing with the correct framing) this section of the day was rather long and did over-run on our schedule, but I feel that the time we spent going over and over the shot, helped to get the shot we had, though I would still have liked to have more practice time with the Merlin before this shot.

The whole day was a case of guerilla style film making with us shooting out in public and this made us aware of our surroundings and we knew that we had little time to set up shots, in case we were ever asked to move on before we got the required shots, but I thought that as a crew we actually managed really well to make sure we got the daytime shoots complete, despite our earlier setback with the Cher Lloyd sequence.

Later that night we all met up again down at Voodoo Lounge where we shot some footage of the band at a fake crime scene; I tried to add some improvised camera movement to get something different from the rest of our earlier scenes, which Rob thought looked good, though we did experience some disturbance from some drunk idiots which Rob decided that we best just move on and cut our shoot short at Voodoo Lounge so we didn't risk running late on our schedule for the rest of the night, this I feel was a very good decision as we couldn't have known how long those idoits were going to hang around and we needed to get all the shots filmed that night.

The last part of the night we shot down at a pedestrian subway near the city centre which involved Joe getting on his skates with the Merlin Steadicam to get some nice smooth action of Run Cmd approaching the audience/camera, I had to pull Joe backwards trying to get the framing and focal length consistent which considering our lack of trails beforehand; me and Joe did a great job and got the desired shots almost straightaway through good communication during filming; we ended the night by having fun and experimenting with filming more footage of Rob's robots that he wanted to be prominent in his music video.

Still of stoop shot on North Hill

Still of band shot opposite Job Centre, shot with telephoto lens to try and make the scene look more like New York with the buildings being seen as high rise buildings; the Jeep helped add to the groups character and disguised the location effectively. 

Scene shot on escape stairs near a city centre car park; aesthetically in-keeping with the Hip Hop style.

Still from our parody rip-off of the opening to Cher Lloyd's 'Swagger Jagger' filmed with Merlin Steadicam.

Still from Pedestrian subway in City Centre; shot on Merlin Steadicam combined with the use of Joe's skates as  I pulled him backwards with the same pace that the group were walking towards the camera, keeping the sharp focus.

Equipment

Camera
Canon 550D x 2

Support
Merlin Steadicam
Velbon Tripod
Fig Rig

Lenses
Sigma 10-20mm F3.5EX-DC
Canon 50mm F1.8
Carl Zeiss planar F1.4 50mm ZE
Canon 24-70mm F2.8
Canon 28mm F2.8
Canon 35mm F2
Opteka HD 0.20X Professional Super AF Fisheye Lens

Target Audience/Screening

The music video will be screened across the social media platform with the likes of YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook, also to be promoted through the likes of the Cafe Concrete sound and film collective and the same associated web places for "Dimensional Schizm" - a Gabber / Breakcore event and radio show run by Dj Contort. Hopefully this video will appeal to those that are interested in the experimental electronic music movement and those that grew up listening to old skool Hip Hop.

One Sheet

Synopsis.

Experimental electronical outfit Run CMD star in their first official music video. A montage of gritty urban scenery, retro fashion, style and robots.

Ricky Everett

Running Time: 5 m 24s

Aspect Ratio: 16:9

Format: HD 1080p

Title: My Adidas are F**ked

Country of Origin: United Kingdom