The making of:
Shooting Periphery’s “Icarus Lives” was the first of three recent music videos that I photographed with the Canon 7D. Co-director Ian McFarland and I decided to test the little rig out on a few micro budget projects that would benefit from a smaller camera team and lighting crew. Normally when we shoot we are working with larger cameras like the RED, but we find that those require more people and expensive accessories to function correctly in a high pace music video environment. The hope was that with the high sensitivity of the 7D, and the ability to use my sill lenses, we could shoot with the bare minimum and still get a great image.

The concept for this video was to create a mystery about the band and to drive the audience’s attention to the energy of the track. Our first idea was that the band would never be in focus, just having them soft enough hold their silhouette, but focus the viewer on each individual member’s energy. We wanted to take those shapes and distort them even more so we then introduced water into the equation, and different layers of glass and transparencies to make every inch of the frame interesting.

I spend a lot of time as a still photographer as well as a filmmaker, and shoot mostly with my trusty Nikon D300 and some kick ass Sigma Macro primes. When I was looking into the new video technology with DSLR’s, I was completely disappointed with Nikon. They really dropped the ball on it. I was annoyed that I had to go to Canon because all my lenses were Nikon, so needless to say I was extremely excited when I found a lens adapter online that allowed me to mount my favorite Nikon glass on the 7D.

Shooting with Sigma’s macro lenses allowed me to have such a shallow depth of field that made it possible for us to create specific focus points on the water droplets directly in front of the lens. This allowed us to ad a subtle movement to each of the shots without ever getting the performer in focus. It was a cool technique.

The 7d did produce some killer images but the camera itself had a lot of trouble keeping up with our on set pace. We had a lot of trouble with getting an external monitor to work easily, we also ran into some overheating issues as well. I really wish that Canon had the swivel monitor that Nikon has, that would really help me when I’m framing my low angle shots. A few releases from now I’m sure Canon will have some upgrades that will make our lives easy. Till then, I’ll make due because I love the final image, and you can’t beat the price!

Since the budget was tight, the production demanded that all our effects needed to be done in camera. That includes the water effects, the lens flares, and the graphics. Everything was done there on set. I remember what a pain in the ass it was to tweak each shot, because it required moving the camera along with 5 c-stands, a plane of glass, two kinos, and then all had to sit on a tray that caught the water. Needless to say it took some time.

We shot the video using the Standard preset because we didn’t have a ton of time for grading. What little I did was done in Color, and it was basically just adjusting the S-curve. Ian is the brains behind all of our video edits and we do full post and grading at his studio Killswitch Productions. At first he wasn’t too excited with Canon’s codec, but once he converted the footage to Prores he was off and running.