I love those music videos with randomness, in this case a guy running around in a clock suit, LOL. Aussie Toby Angwin directed this music video for the Aussie band Trial Kennedy. Fantastic song and the awkward drama that plays out with the guy in the clock suit I hope that you enjoy Toby’s write-up.

Soup Kitchen Films

Trial Kennedy Band

Production write-up:

The band wanted a guy in a clock suit. They didn’t say he couldn’t be crying….

I was contacted by Trial Kennedy’s manager who had seen some of my other work. The band had a concept they liked with a zany light hearted Beatles feel. I didn’t feel it suited the song but after a few chats both with the band and Tov Belling (the DP) and Tim Burgin (the Art Director), I formed a concept that worked for me and the band and management gave me the freedom to take the clip in a stranger direction than they had envisaged. We didn’t know who was playing the clock suit guy so Tim knocked up the clock suit the afternoon before the shoot based on an average sized man.

The clip had a very low budget but just enough to stretch to shooting on a RED One camera. The shoot was a single day which was ample for a performance clip like this. I had used the location before for a clip where we had just needed a large black void and I had wanted to get back into it to shoot it properly for some time. It is a huge old shed in the Docklands here in Melbourne. A great feature of it are its walls full of holes, creating great points of light all over the place which gave us hell on the last clip where we wanted straight black! We shot using a set of Zeiss Standards as well as a PL mounted Canon 300mm that Tov brought as a surprise. My regular gaffer Anthony Veith had lit the last clip we had shot in this shed and knew the space and, importantly for a location of this size and a clip of this budget, where the power was. Due to the tight budget we were restricted to using smaller fixtures and Tov and I agreed that we would shoot with the shed door open to give us the kind of high key light we wanted. I’m a big fan of using as many prac lights as possible and we placed all our extra band lighting on the ground around them, as well as a 2k fresnel on a stand to give the lead guitarist a little rim light. You can see this clearly in most of the shots as it also gave really nice flares. I had wanted to throw as much light as possible into the background but it was impossible with what we had. Tov and Anthony had the much better idea of having three 1k par cans shining off the back wall, creating a geometric pattern. You can see our entire lighting setup really clearly in the final frame. Everything is there except the 2k on a stand because it would have stuck out like a sore thumb. All the lights for the clip were open face without any diffusion or gels.

On the day of the shoot I was as sick as a dog and barely able to function. Consequently I think we WAY over shot the performance because I was concerned that I was going to forget a verse or chorus and be stuck with a big hole in the cut. The band were great and performed really well which makes the job of making them look awesome much easier! I don’t storyboard or even shotlist performance clips. Musicians aren’t actors and I find the best way to create a good performance is to not over direct them and find the performance intuitively. I start the day shooting wide shots and watch them, then work out how best to cover each member and how to approach them. Sometimes I give explicit directions but I have found that often a singer or guitarist will be doing something really cool without knowing it and if you tell them to repeat it, they get self conscious and the moment is lost.

This was also the first time that Tov and I had worked together properly. Luckily we both have a fairly similar aesthetic and I quickly realised I could trust his judgement if I was too under the weather to concentrate! (not that that happened). The shoot went really smoothly. Technically we only had two issues for the day. Firstly we didn’t have enough track to do a clean run from one side of the shed to the other as it’s huge and the floor was cambered. Our budget didn’t have room for two assistants to spend the day levelling a hundred foot track. Our budget didn’t have room for a hundred feet of track either so we handheld the shots off the dolly which led to our second technical glitch which was the RED RAID skipping frames on the handheld shots. Thankfully the DIT had a CF card which worked perfectly. I strongly recommend that you avoid shooting on hard drives. Not only are they less reliable but you don’t get the same sense of how much footage you are shooting.

Our one funny hiccup was that when the friend of the band appeared to play the clock guy he was TINY! Even the long underwear we had was baggy on him. Luckily he was a natural performer and totally got how I wanted the character to behave. Our biggest issue was everyone getting too carried away when they were fighting. The clock suit barely made it through the day being constantly kicked by the band!

The edit was pretty straightforward and the entire post production took about 10 days from start to delivery. I started out editing clips for another director and while I occasionally use an offline editor I still like to do all the fine cutting myself. The part that took the most time was finding the structure of the narrative. I tend not to write narratives that are tied to specific moments in the track as it frees up the shoot and lets you concentrate on finding great moments right there on set rather than making sure you are covering your shotlist exactly. It’s not a way that works for everyone and I don’t do it on every shoot but for something like this it worked really well. The drawback is that you have to craft the story in the edit much more than when you have shot everything to plan. We had so much great footage of our clock guy screaming, crying, running, being generally distraught that it was hard to let shots go! The performance cutting was easy and I just let the music guide the cut. I use FCP and transferred all the RED footage to ProRes 422HQ using the Log and Transfer in FCP. I cut everything in HD and maintain an HD master even though delivery is still on Digi Beta.

I graded the clip myself. It is actually pretty close to how it was shot. I much prefer shooting a with a strong look built in rather than to shoot flat and do everything in post. While I try and avoid to much post filtration I ended up having to put a fairly heavy glow into the highlights because the RED just couldn’t handle the contrast ratio of the bright sun to the dimly lit interior. To be fair, nothing could but whatever build we shot on (15 or 16 from memory) was particularly bad at clipping the highlights and we had a LOT of them. So I ended up doing the a minimal grade in Color, just balancing out the shots due to the changing exposure of the sun, then I put the whole clip through Shake and applied a Gennarts Sapphire Glow over the whole clip. I’m a huge fan of the Sapphire plugins and I use their glow pretty much exclusively to take the edge off any clipped highlights though usually I try and be more subtle.

I was unsure of how the band and label would react to the demented clock man but they liked it and we had a fun time making it which is ultimately the most important thing.

Credits:
Production Manager: Ben Grogan

Production Designer: Tim Burgin

DOP: Tov Belling

Camera Assistant: Dora Krolikowska

Gaffer: Anthony Veith

Key Grip: Peter MacDonnell

Producer/Director/Editor/Colorist: Toby Angwin

END

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