How I made an infrared, time-lapse, underwater music video.

yostopia (64)in #photography • 8 years ago (edited)

This is the story of making one of the only infrared music videos ever,
including underwater infrared and infrared time-lapse sequences.

The SF-based band Yassou Benedict came to me in June of 2014 and asked me to help them make a music video for a new song that needed strong visuals. I hadn’t heard the song yet, but co-founder Lilie Bytheway-Hoy was clear about wanting a unique visual style for the piece. “Unique” in the music video field is a tall order, but I already had a converted D200 from a few years back and I’d been experimenting with a recently IR-converted Nikon D5200 for a time-lapse project that I wanted to accomplish that summer in Hawaii. So I suggested that we do some tests. We got together at my house and took the camera and a slider into my backyard to see what we could do.

The D200 and D5200 each have different strengths and weaknesses. The D200 is an old body but it does have a 10-pin terminal, which allows for precise shoot-move-shoot motion control when capturing time-lapse sequences with my eMotimo TB3 3-axis mo-co head. I bought the D5200 for its ability to shoot real-time video, which was going to be key to making the video work. I didn’t have an underwater housing for my Nikons, but I did have a dry bag for an older Canon XF100 Camcorder, which has an IR mode, so (along with a 720 nanometer filter) I used that for the underwater infrared shots we eventually needed.

By August we had clear ideas for the look, but I still hadn’t heard the music track yet and was curious about where the song would take us. Lilie sent me the first cut of the track in September and I was hooked. The song starts with a lo-fi sequence of James Jackson singing in the background and then kicks into the first verse with a strong bass drop. Structurally, it has a long first verse and then splits into two polar opposite vibes in the second section, alternating between a frenetic feel and a very calm release. In short, a great aural canvas to paint on!

The creative vision for the piece didn’t come easily. We struggled quite a bit with developing different ideas that would play well in infrared. In a late September, rehearsal, Theo Quimby (their keys/synth player) was joking that perhaps synchronized swimming would be a good direction for the video. 21st century Busby Berkeley! Lilie picked up on that and called me the next day asking if this would be possible. WTF! Of course I didn’t know any synchronized swimmers, but I had seen (and loved) many of those old film starring Esther Williams and the thought was so crazy intriguing that we began doing research on whether any swimmers were even available for something like this. Eventually that search led us to the only professional synch swimming team in the USA, the Aqualilies. I contacted their manager in LA, Mesha Kussman, and laid out our plans for the video. They’d recently done a music video with Justin Bieber and had worked on TV shows like Glee, with Justin Timberlake and others. With our limited budget it looked like it may not be possible, but Mesha was fascinated by the project and loved the music, so she agreed to collaborate with us in early October.

We had swimmers! Not just swimmers, but the best on the planet.
Game on, and the stakes just got higher.

The Aqualilies obviously need a large pool to perform in, and we had to find one for them. It had to be private, and I was lucky to know someone with a beautiful pool and facilities to support all the talent (6 swimmers, 2 coaches) and the production crew (5 of us). For time-lapse sequences we needed clouds behind Lilie, plus we wanted to portray her as huge, so the hills of western Marin county lie below her as if she’s hundreds of feet tall. There are very few places other than the top of a mountain where you can get that effect.

I already had the converted Nikon D200 for shooting IR time-lapse, and it was perfect for the mountain shots. I also had a dry bag for the Canon XF100 for shooting the underwater sequences, but the XF100’s lens wasn’t wide enough for the overhead pool shots. This is where the D5200 was essential. We needed the ability to use different lenses for different scenes and I ended up shooting most of the overhead pool sequences with the Tokina 11-16/2.8 (and some of the sequences were shot with a Nikon 17-55/2.8). I purchased a 15’ crane from Proaim for those critical overhead shots and that crane has come in handy on a few other shoots already.

Of course there were trials… Usually the weather is my biggest challenge because almost all of the work I do is outdoors. Sometimes I need clouds and there are no clouds. But for the swimming sequences we needed sun and warm weather and were lucky to get that at the end of October. I pre-visualize everything I do in advance for shoots like this, so when I walk on set the day of, I’m comfortable that I can do what’s necessary even when the eventual challenges arise. The Aqualilies were such professionals… it was all I could do to keep up with them as they went through their routines, listening the music blasting through a special underwater speaker system they use. We recorded the song 20% faster than the track’s actual speed and executed all the choreography to that. We over-cranked the shot at 30p and in post I slowed it back down to normal speed so that the swimmer’s motions would have an extra little bit of smoothness, and that enhanced the dreamy surreal quality. We made extensive use of the Blade Speed function in FCPX for fine adjustments in timing.

During post/finishing, working with these three infrared mediums of real-time, time-lapse and underwater cinematography had unique challenges and we needed seamless integration in order to sell the vision. That was accomplished primarily by bringing the FCPX edit timeline into Davinci Resolve and using Resolve’s advanced controls for matching tonality from shot-to-shot, which integrated the disparate visual components.

Collaboration is key!

As always, when you bring talented people into a creative project, what you get is synergistic… much greater than the sum of its parts. Working with Lilie’s concept from the beginning was exciting and then sitting with her in the edit bay for weeks, helping her to accomplish her vision for the final piece, taught me so much. Creative projects are a process and slowing down allows the process to play itself out naturally instead of forcing it.

Anyone who wants to come up with their own look needs to explore what turns them on. My credo is that I’m “looking to explore the mystery in life through a careful examination of the natural world,” and everything I shoot supports that philosophy. I know that if I stay true to my own personal ethos, all of my work will have a consistency and “look” to it.
But it’s taken me a long time to come to this place of understanding, and I’m learning more about it every day.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the shoot day with the Aqualilies:

Thanks for watching.

I have a long history of inventing tools for animators and also making films and photographs. My wife, daughter and I live at the foot of beautiful Mt. Tamalpais on the San Francisco Bay and I've been using technology to tell complex stories for a long time. My biggest claim to fame? Leading the team that created Autodesk 3ds Max... the most popular 3D animation tool of all time. When I sold the Yost Group to Autodesk at the end of the last century I jumped headfirst into pursing my original love... photography and filmmaking. Now I spend all of my time exploring the mysteries of my world with my cameras, and revealing what I find in my images and films.

You can find my verification post here.

#filmmaking #music-video #infrared