Making music videos sing

Post, Nov, 2003 by Matthew Armstrong

"There are some amazing videos out there and people are doing groundbreaking work," says Martinez. "Music videos are really a labor of love. The money's not even in the ballpark of the money in commercials. In a way though, that makes it better because you're not always worried about how much money you're spending and it makes it more of a creative outlet."

O'Neil says there are two types of videos: the ones that are a job and the ones that you love, like the video they're working on called No Fucking Around. O'Neil loved the song and called the band's management to ask if they could do a video.

It's projects like this that keeps O'Neil excited about creating music videos, explaining, "Here [at Reconnaissance Films] we like to have a sense of ownership in the projects we do, and music videos allow you to do that,"

Filmworks/FX onlines MC Lyte

SANTA MONICA -- Animator/visual effects artist Ken Locsmandi of Filmworks/FX (www.filmworksfx.com) has worked on a wide range of music videos, including ones for Smashmouth (Pacific Coast Party), Bow Wow (Basketball), Slum Village (Tainted), Our Lady Peace (Somewhere Out There) and the recent Ride Wit Me for rap artist MC Lyte. Filmworks/FX uses the Leitch dpsVelocity nonlinear editor as its uncompressed online system.

"We digitize into dpsVelocity using SDI from tape or from the da Vinci telecine," explains Locsmandi. "Using the Virtual Tape File System native to dpsVelocity, which makes the individual frames of video immediately available, we copy all of the source footage to a directory on our server. The VTFS is one of the most valuable things about dpsVelocity. Our visual effects artists then access the footage from the server. Once the footage has been manipulated and finalized as required for the effects, it is re-rendered and re-imported into the dpsVelocity for conforming into the final edit and output."

On the MC Lyte video (pictured), animation and effects were created using Alias Maya and Adobe After Effects, before finishing on dpsVelocity. "Velocity has made it possible for us to cost effectively complete many music videos and other video products, and has proven itself to be a great online system while remaining extremely affordable."

Editorial/design/effects house MK12 (www.mk12.com) in Kansas City, which usually works solely on commercials and broadcast design, recently finished its second music video, which was conceived, produced and posted via production company The Ebeling Group. The video for the band Hot Hot Heat's song "No, Not Now" plays out like a comic-book-style, action-adventure story through an other-worldly amusement park complete with a sexy heroine suited up in vinyl and evil villains in bunny suits. The video was filmed at the MK12 soundstage against greenscreen using a combination of stationary (Panasonic 24p DVX100) and hand-held cameras. Design work was completed in Illustrator and Photoshop, and was keyed using the Ultiimatte Primatte and Advantage plug-ins for After Effects. The sequences were assembled in After Effects and timings were tweaked using Final Cut.