Grain of Wood
A couple of months ago I talked with Eric van de Kerkhof about the upcoming album “Welcome Home” of his new band Grain of Wood. At that time he was still in the middle of recording the album but he was interested in making a music video for one of the tracks to promote his music.
I did a photo shoot with the band a couple of weeks ago and last Monday we shot the video in a beautiful small theatre.
Preparation
In the weeks before the shoot I talked with Eric about what he wanted for the video. He pointed me to some videos he liked so I could get an idea how to prepare. He wanted the video to show the band actual making music, enjoying themselves and interacting with each other. He wanted the feel of a live performance.
He managed to secure the local theatre as the location for the shoot. It’s a beautiful small theatre with about 350 seats. We were able to use the location for 8 hours and that included the support of a lighting technician of the theatre to set-up and control the lights during the shoot.
I prepared a shot list using the Shot Lister app on my iPad so I could track our progress and make sure I didn’t forget anything.
Shooting the music video
The shooting was pretty straight forward. I made a short timelapse video while we’re busy setting everything up which you can watch below.
After setting up the stage and fine tuning the lighting I shot all the angles I wanted. As I was only using one camera, the band had to play their song about 10 times so I could cover all the shots I needed.
I first shot from the back of the band and from the front. Then I focussed on all the individual musicians and I shot several angles from within the hall and from the balcony.
I shot the video on a Panasonic AF101 using a SmallHD Dp1-x field monitor. I had a scary moment when I saw a lot of artefacts on the monitor in the dark areas next to the smoke lit areas but fortunately these ugly artefacts where not recorded in camera. Probably something to do with the compression of the signal via HDMI.
I tried to get some subtle movement in every shot by using a slider or by using a monopod. The Manfrotto 561BHDV monopod is an ideal tool for getting stable shots while still having lots of flexibility and possibility for movement.
Below you can see a couple of pictures made during the shoot of the video. All photographs by Davy Landman who helped me during the day.
