If one was asked to sum up Thomas Dolby’s musical career in three words, ‘expect the unexpected’ might be good ones. Though perhaps best known as one of the early pioneers of Electronica, he’s worked across a multitude of genres, with a long list of big names, both as artist and producer, so I guess that when he sent me the rough mix of ‘The Toadlickers’, to see if I’d be interested in directing the music video, I shouldn’t have been surprised by its ‘brand new mash of Bluegrass and Techno’…but I was (very pleasantly I might add) and leapt, as it were, at the opportunity.
The Toadlickers is about a group of scientists who live in the hills of Snowdonia, get high licking toads (well actually ingesting their hallucinogenic venom and no, it’s NOT an urban myth), get ‘the munchies’, then invade the local town, raiding sweet shops and convenience stores for tasty treats. The video has three main elements, each of which required a separate shoot, Thomas and his band; The Toadlickers (played by top free runners from Urban Freeflow – the official worldwide Parkour & free running network); and a cast of naughty puppets brought to life by Mike Quinn (of ‘The Muppets’ & ‘Star Wars’ fame).
Our first shoot was at an American roots music festival in Suffolk…where the American roots musicians come from…. Thomas was appearing there with his band, ‘The Toadlickers’, aka Kevin Armstrong (guitar), Matthew Seligman (bass), Justin Hildreth (drums) and Aaron Jonah Louis (violin), most of whom are long standing musical collaborators of his and/or perform on the track. As Imogen Heap (who plays jaws harp on the recording) couldn’t be there, the glamour was provided by burlesque starlets Millie Dollar & Sophia St. Villier.
Thomas’ neighbour, Paul Spencer (who runs the festival) had kindly arranged for us to have private access to a back barn on the site. In an ideal world we would have shot there after dark to simplify lighting, but it was the height of summer and there was a curfew in force, making this impractical…unless we wanted to work faster than Toadlickers on speed. The next best option would have been to completely black out the barn, but given the size of the budget and crew, this was unrealistic, so we went for the third option…pray for rain (or more to the point, overcast skies, and the diffuse, even lighting they would bring), after all, if there’s one thing you can rely upon to be bad, it’s the English weather, right? Wrong! Several days before the shoot, the country was engulfed by a heatwave and the day of the shoot itself turned out to be one of the hottest and sunniest on record.
Since it was so bright and we were shooting with Canon EOS 5D Mark IIs, we could simply have ramped up the ISO and shot with available light. However, whilst the 5D Mark IIs have legendary low light abilities, their sensors, like performers, are at their best with some form of illumination. Added to which, gaps in the walls of the barn and a motley collection of completely inaccessible windows and skylights meant that beams of harsh sunlight were forming pools in areas of deep shadow, so lighting was required to control this extreme contrast ratio.
As Mike would be creating cutaways of the puppets, this lighting needed to be kept as simple as possible, to enable him to match his shots to ours with the minimum of fuss, so no smoke…or mirrors…which, given his background at Industrial Light & Magic, is very much his department in any case! Also, I was conscious that our only power source was a rather rickety looking domestic double socket located several hundred feet away and that in order to reach it, we would have to run several linked reels of extension cable along the entire length of the barn, across numerous bales of hay, through a disused milking plant, into a back room. Don’t try this at home kids! Long cable runs create resistance, which creates heat, and I didn’t think our insurers would have been best pleased if we had set fire to the barn and killed everyone at the festival, as even I know there IS such a thing as bad publicity. All of which made daylight balanced fluorescents the obvious choice as they would be the correct colour temperature, draw minimal current and remain cool throughout the shoot.
Having spent the morning clearing the barn of everything from toilets to barbecues, the next step was to dress the set, which was accomplished in record time thanks to a small army of Thomas’ fans, ‘The Flat Earth Society‘, who were on hand to move hay bales and chicken coups. Whilst this was happening, Tommy Lloyd-Baker (stylist) & Thomas’ wife Kathleen (hair & make-up), were hard at work behind the scenes, creating the look we’d discussed. When I saw Kathleen recently at Tedx Aldburgh, she told me it was just like old times. Since her background includes The Godfather 2, I’m taking that as a compliment, though somehow I doubt she was comparing me to Francis Ford Coppola…
With our cast & set dressed and ready to go, it was lighting up time. Our key lights were two Kino Flo 4x4s. Backlighting came from a long, thin, high window in the wall of the barn, which provided just the right amount of separation. Fill was shaped with barn doors…actual ones…located either side of the band and slid open/closed as necessary to control the bulk of the available light. Whilst it’s unconventional to light from both sides, in this instance, doing so helped to give Thomas’ face the lean, mean, angular shape I wanted.
Because Mike would be comping puppets into various band shots, we needed to avoid camera movements to the greatest extent possible, to save him from motion tracking and rotoscoping hell, so most of these were done with the Canon 5D Mark IIs on locked off Sachtler FSB-8 tripods. Now as a rule, if I’m going to get excited about something with legs, it’s not generally a tripod, but I must admit that having used these on several recent shoots, I’ve rather fallen in love with the Sachtler FSB-8 system.
Our lenses were Zeiss ZFs (a mixture of the 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm & 100mm), which produced outstanding sharpness, colour rendition and consistency. Since the ZF series are actually Nikon mount lenses, we used them with adaptors. Of course we could have specified Zeiss ZE lenses, which use exactly the same glass and have Canon EOS mounts, but the ZEs lack the manual aperture ring of the ZFs and we’re old school.
Talking of which, coming from a film background, I’m normally a big advocate of doing everything in camera, but the Canon 5D Mark II demands a different strategy as its video output (unlike its stills output) is 8bit… i.e. exactly the same bit depth as a JPEG. If you’ve ever tried to process JPEGs in Photoshop (or any other software), you’ll know that there’s only so much you can do to them before they start breaking down and looking ugly. Exactly the same is true of 8 bit video files and for this reason, the more you do in camera, the less you are able to do when grading. That’s why it’s best to set up the Canon 5D Mark II (and all other HDSLRs) to produce as neutral an output as possible. We achieved this by setting the picture style to ‘Neutral’ (the flattest default ‘picture style’ available), turning down the ‘Sharpness’, ‘Contrast’ & ‘Saturation’ a couple of notches and setting a custom white balance using a Colour Confidence Total Balance as a target.
Zacuto demonstrated a while ago that the optimal ISO settings for Canon 5D Mark IIs are the ‘in-between’ speeds and since it’s always best to use the lowest possible native sensitivity, we shot at ISO 320. Aperture was a cinematic F4.5 as I’ve never been a big fan of the ‘everything but a gnats whisker out of focus’ approach to film making (was it Stu Maschwitz who first coined the term ‘bokehke’?)
Though most of our band shots had to be locked off, we were able to go handheld for the shots of our line dancing toadlickers (choreographed by Roasalind Masson). This was accomplished by placing the 5D on a Red Rock Micro rig and using a Zeiss ZF 18mm lens stopped down to F8. The combination of this ultra wide optic, smallish aperture and the old Steadicam trick of focussing at infinity ensured a depth of focus that would have made Gregg Toland proud (cue the sound of 20,000 Philip Bloom followers choking…whilst googling Gregg Toland :-)) By making the characteristics of our equipment work to our advantage, we disproved the myths that focus and fast motion need to be problems when shooting with HDSLRs.
Working with Thomas and his band was an absolute pleasure as they are consummate professionals, who are used to being on camera. As a result, once we got going, we were able to work at a relentless pace and it’s to their credit that most of the close ups of them that you see are first takes! Having arrived on location at 8am and finished shooting them in the barn at 8pm, we then headed over to the stage, to shoot Thomas’ live show. For this we, once again, used the Canon 5D Mark IIs & Zeiss primes on a Sachtler FSB-8 tripod and a Red Rock Micro shoulder rig, adding an essential Zacuto Z-Finder to allow accurate focussing whilst shooting. Constantly changing, multi coloured stage lighting meant that manual white balancing was out, so the ‘tungsten’ preset was selected and performed admirably at ISO 320 with a variety of apertures. Then it was back to the barn to shoot some background plates that Mike could use for composites.
With our footage in the can, or on the SanDisk Extreme Pro 64GB cards to be more precise, we had completed part one of our production and all without a single case of sensor overheating or even any perceivable signal degradation, which, considering that we had the cameras switched on and in regular use for over nine hours, in sweltering heat, seems to shatter a few myths about Canon HDSLRs.
Stay tuned for part 2, in which I’ll be talking puppets, parkour and post production.
© 2010 – 2015, Paul D. All rights reserved.
