After completing the music video for the song, “Heavybad” I knew that I wanted to work again with Boss Rebel on their next music video. I had the idea to shoot a video for “Name in Lights” that involved using vari-speed and one single take. Little did I know how much work it would involve.

We filmed on a Saturday afternoon in a warehouse with around 50 extras and enough confetti that I’m sure is still stuck in most of our lungs from that day.

Photo by Kevin Van Lierop

In the end we did 16 takes, with take number 13 being the magic number.

Photo by Kevin Van Lierop

Photo by Kevin Van Lierop

Getting the vari-speed vision in my head to work was another beast all together.

To get the frame ramping to work, it was a process of taking the lyrics of the song, matching where each word happened in time on the video as well as where it happens in the song and then telling the editing software to move video frame “A” to match song frame “A”. A lengthy process.

Here is how the video looked, straight off the camera:

There is no lighting and the song is sped up and slowed down during certain parts. This was done so the chorus would always feel slower and the verse by Dreddy would be quicker to match the rapid fire pace of they lyrics.

Once the keyframeing was done, I ran into my first hurdle of the process… rendering. The first render passes that I did on the video would take almost 8 hours to complete. Trying to keep productivity up, it was tough because It would take 8 hours to see if there were any frame issues, and there were plenty. I could only do one fix a day, because every time something need to be fixed, I would have to render the entire thing. Looking back at the process, I did all of the key framing and time mapping in Final Cut Pro… my first mistake.

Final cut pro is an editing package, not a visual effects platform. This is where I made my second mistake… After reading on support boards for the time ramping plugin that Adobe Premiere was the best solution, I re-entered the keyframeing data (1395) events into premiere. While the render time came down to 4 hours, the video would never export properly and produced a jello effect on the band. I thought that my solution would be to put everything on the highest quality and let the mac crunch the numbers. This resulted in a 36 hour render time. In the end I was left with a 20GB video file that looked horrible. This file still had none of the artificial lighting that I had included.

The artificial lighting was done in Adobe After Effects. Out of frustration I thought that I would try the time mapping plugin in After Effects and roll the dice to see if it produced better results. It did. After re entering all of the keyframe data (for the third time now) the vision that I was in my head became a reality. I simplified the artificial lighting because the motion tracking was all over the place. Another mistake, when shooting something with artificial elements, put some sort of marker on the wall so the you can track the camera motion.

In the end, I’m pleased with the results. Approaching a project that requires visual effects, I know that I’ll be more prepared next time.

I’d like to thank the guys from Boss Rebel for their patience with this project.