Music videos: it takes more than scantily-clad, beautiful people to keep the MTV generation from changing channels

Post, Nov, 2002 by Ann Fisher

SMART PACING

Deadstar Assembly's music video of Send Me an Angel, a hard rock/techno blend twisted version, is a "nice contrast of fast-paced performance with narrative going on. It's a Hollywood-like production. A little bit of both will keep viewers interested," says Adam Dearborn, art director at Battle Medialab (www.battlemedialab.com) in Hollywood, FL. It went on-air this fall.

Battle Medialab handled the post end, including editing and graphics. This branding company spends 30 percent of its time creating music videos and touts its Avidi/DS HD, which it uses for editing/compositing and graphics effects. It has done HD music video projects for Richie Marley among others.

Send Me an Angel comes from director Rip Odelbralski and his company Structured Chaos, also in Hollywood, FL. It is a full-fledged production with feature film values like full 3D CG, stunt coordinators involved with wirework, explosions and pyrotechnics, full sets, talent and makeup. The scene is post-apocalyptic. The band performs at a ruined temple; the narrative features a ship battle from which a crew member calls to an angel for help. It was shot on 35mm.

THE CHALLENGE: There was a lot of integration of material from different sources and they had to test the limits of the Avid/DS with all the tracking, wire removal and color correcting. The film was transferred to Digi Beta, the CG work was done in Alias/Wavefront Maya. The tracking needed to combine the live action with the CG sets. The compositing dealt with explosions that were virtual and real. However, the post house bought the Avid/DS HD last year for just this kind of task.

"The main reason we decided on that tool was because it provided the most integrated, and most amount of, features," says Rod Molina, Battle's technical director. "Before we chose it we evaluated three separate systems in-house. HD was our number-one concern. Next was what we do--not just production, we do a lot of corporate design/media, Web or video--and we wanted something that would provide us with different features but be able to integrate them well. That's one thing that the DS is very good at; everything can be done at one workstation. We tested it against the Sony Xpri [before it was officially released] and a Jaleo system."

INTERESTING ELEMENTS

"This video is very kinetic. There's a marriage of a lot of things going on--things shot on location with very different set-ups, camera techniques and lenses used to apply different effects," says Omar Chavez, creative director of American Filmworks/Miami (www.americanfilmworks.com), about Que Vivan Los Ninos, a music video for Latin American star Ana Christina through Sony Music International. Adds Marcelo Paez, one of the owners, "In this case we took a song that was very cliche/expected, because it is targeted to kids, and we turned it into more like hip-hop performance video appealing to kids who now are on the edge. And we mixed it with animation that could have easily been developed by them, which attracts and identifies the audience."