Music VIDEOS - Creative COW · MUSIC VIDEOS A LOOK AT SOME OF ... Perhaps it’s only fitting that a band like Oasis — so famously Mancunian — should choose to work with a Manchester-based

Creative COWC R E A T I V E C O M M U N I T I E S O F T H E W O R L D

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A LOOK INSIDE SOME OF THE INDUSTRY’S MOST CREATIVE TEAMS

MORE SIGNAL, LESS NOISE™ — CREATIVECOW.NET JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2008

THE MAGAZINE FOR MEDIA PROFESSIONALS WORKING IN FILM, AUDIO, VIDEO, MOTION GRAPHICS, IMAGING AND DESIGN

Music VIDEOS• Music Video Production

• Arri D20 and Sci-Fi’s Tin Man• P2 Digital Workflow

• RED Workflow Feedback• Authoring 5.1 in Soundtrack

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CREATIVE COW MAGAZINEA CREATIVECOW.NET PUBLICATION

PUBLISHERS: Ron & Kathlyn Lindeboom

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER: Tim Wilson

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF: Ron & Kathlyn Lindeboom

and Tim [email protected]

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:Thomas Burstyn, Eki Halkka,

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Creative COW Magazine is published bi-monthly by CreativeCOW.net (Creative Communities of the World) at 125 Alydar Place, Paso Robles, CA 93446. (805) 239-5645. Postage paid at Hanover, New Hampshire. U.S. subscrip-tion rates are free to qualified subscribers. Creative COW is a registered trademark of CreativeCOW.net. All rights are reserved. Magazine contents are copyright © 2008 by Creative COW Magazine. All rights are reserved. Right of reprint is granted only to non-commercial educational institutions such as high schools, colleges and universi-ties. No other grants are given.

The opinions of our writers do not always reflect those of the publisher and while we make every effort to be as accurate as possible, we cannot and do not assume responsibility for damages due to errors or omissions.

LEGAL STATEMENT: All information in this magazine is offered without guarantee as to its accuracy and appli-cability in all circumstances. Please consult an attorney, business advisor, accountant or other professional to dis-cuss your individual circumstances. Use of the informa-tion in this magazine is not intended to replace profes-sional counsel. Use of this information is at your own risk and we assume no liability for its use.

Poets of the Fall: Carnival of RustA platinum selling band’s new video. 200 shots in 18 hours.

Behind the Scenes from behind OasisAn English icon comes home to play for the hometown fans

A Labor of Love: Art Pepper RememberedPreserving the legacy of Jazz Hall of Famer, Art Pepper

Finding the Heart of ARRI’s D20 in Tin Man A self-confessed ‘film snob’ leverages the efficiencies of HD

P2 Digital Workflows Using the PanasonicHPX500 cameraSecrets of working with the all-digital HPX500 workflow

COWs in the News Best of the year podcast, Oscar and Golden Globe nominees

RED: Early Workflow FindingsA student film at Brooks Institute puts RED through its paces

Authoring 5.1 in Apple Soundtrack ProA look at how Soundtrack and Compressor are used in 5.1

Avid Says No Booth for NAB 2008You won’t find Avid on the show floor in 2008

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Creative COWC R E A T I V E C O M M U N I T I E S O F T H E W O R L D

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THE MAGAZINE FOR MEDIA PROFESSIONALS WORKING IN VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO, MOTION GRAPHICS, IMAGING & DESIGN

In This Issue:Tim Wilson’s Column ............................................ 8Ron Lindeboom’s column .................................. 46

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MUSIC VIDEOSA LOOK AT SOME OF THE INDUSTRY’S MOST CREATIVE TEAMS

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to 10 HD signals on a single screen – something no other switcher in this price range can do. With standard features – such as DVE effects, Chroma Key, DSK, HD-SDI In/Out, and Frame Store on all inputs – it’s all the switcher you’ll need for HD/SD production. For more information, please visit us at www.panasonic.com/broadcast.

switch to HDwithout switching everything.

PBTS-0120-400Switch-CCw.indd 1 12/13/07 2:15:59 PM

Nel JohnsonManchester, England UKwww.studioskylab.com

Working with partner Nigel Collier, Nel Johnson and Studio Skylab have earned awards from Cream, NME, the British Video Association and BAFTA, for clients in-cluding Sony, BBC, Nokia, Microsoft, Universal and many more. Nel says, “The ethos behind Skylab is one of experimentation, discovery and enjoying what we do.” You’ll find him in the COW’s After Effects and Trapcode forums, among others.

Photo by David Fisher / Rex USALiam Gallagher of Oasisat the Brit Awards 2007

For Oasis, it was a big night. Scratch that. It was a huge night. Oasis, the self-proclaimed kings of

Britpop, were to receive a lifetime achievement award at the 2007 Brit awards. The event was being broadcast live to the nation, and my company had provided the film that played on a huge screen behind the band as they performed the show’s grand finale.

Perhaps it’s only fitting that a band like Oasis — so famously Mancunian — should choose to work with a Manchester-based agency. There’s definitely a North-South divide within the UK creative community, so it was with a sense of Northern pride we had brought the job home. There was no way we were going to let the band down.

Debuts & firstsPrior to starting Studio Skylab, I was in London for five years. The latter part was spent heading up the interac-tive division of Metropolis Studios, a recording complex

in West London. During that time I looked after many music industry projects, including DVDs for Led Zeppe-lin, Moloko and Live Aid.

Oasis had recorded at the studio many times and had become comfortable with the complex. When they were looking for a team to work on an upcoming inter-active DVD project, we were the natural first choice for their director Dick Carruthers.

The DVD was to mark the 10th anniversary release

of the band’s debut album, Definitely maybe, and I was responsible for the design of the disc.

It was a first for DVD design in that the concept was to make the disc a visual version of the original audio release. The menu itself lasted the whole length of the album with each individual track representing a point of navigation from where you could access live tracks, pro-mos and rare footage. That was my original concept and the band approved.

The DVD was released in September 2004 and quickly went triple platinum. To my great delight, it re-ceived a BAFTA (the British Academy of Film and Televi-sion Arts) nomination for interactive design and won the NME award for best DVD, voted by the readers of that highly influential British music magazine.

Oasis liked our creative treatment so much that they asked us to use the same graphical style for a Channel 4 documentary, “There We Were, Now Here We Are...: The Making Of Oasis.”

50 miLLion recorDs LaterIn 2007 the people behind the prestigious Brit Awards decided to give Oasis a lifetime achievement award. The band naturally turned to Dick Carruthers to pro-duce their segment of the show, a live set of five tracks. Thanks in large part to our success with the Oasis DVD project, Dick in turn came to me.

He commissioned Skylab to provide stage visuals for the show’s finale for their massive hit “Rock ‘n’ Roll

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Star.” It was a challenge I was more than happy to accept and was one of the highest profile jobs we had taken since my business partner Nigel Collier and I opened Studio Skylab in 2004.

The brief from Dick was quite simple: he wanted something bold and eye-catching, but nothing that had a narrative or was deeply interpretive of the lyrical con-tent. I thought the punchiest way to go would be to il-lustrate the words “rock,” “roll,” and “star.”

Oasis had indicated they were at that time very in-terested in pop art. This was ideal, as one of my favor-ite artists is Robert Indiana, an American pop artist. His style utilizes lots of flat primary colors, stars, squares, cir-cles, bold, brash stencil letters and numbers. I thought it perfectly suited the song.

The band approved the concept and with just five days to go until the event itself, the pressure was on. We locked ourselves away, cranked up the music and went nuts.

visuaL founDationsI started off with a content-gathering exercise. The idea was to collect textures and imagery that would help carry the concept in the appropriate style.

We went out and shot abstracts of gig posters, fo-cusing on torn edges and the multiple overlaid graph-

ics formed by the succession of posters left stuck to the wall underneath. These formed a visual collage that would act as a backdrop for the scenes we were about to create.

We imported them into After Effects, then turned them into 3D objects. We dropped them back in z-depth, away from the camera, to form a distant backdrop.

Others we positioned at intervals between the camera and the far backdrop. To these we applied vari-ous modes of transparency so the whole effect was an interplay of light and texture from the camera view to the far distance.

PLaYinG off the musicaL cuesRandom movement was applied to the camera’s point of interest using Trapcode SoundKeys, which was patched to an audio file from an earlier rehearsal session. This gave us a lovely parallax effect when all the layers were moving within the comps, in time to the music.

That was the basis of various scenes that made up the visuals for the song. But the animation wouldn’t run in one long composition from start to end because no one knew quite what speed the band would play.

The driver went down the night before the live show, where Dick was completing final preparation for the performance. Time was tight but we made it (just!).

We one final hurdle to clear. Before transmission, the film was subjected to a strict technical preview to en-sure it could be safely broadcast. Thankfully it passed.

So now that we had successfully delivered the proj-ect all that was left was to sit back, Jack Daniels in hand and enjoy the show.

The anticipation on the night was immense. As the band took to the stage, there was the excitement of see-ing our own work on a huge event like the Brits, coupled with concern at what might have happened to the film after it left our hands.

Then the familiar strains of the tune began and I can honestly say it was a career highlight for me. To see a band I’ve known, loved and respected for over a de-cade, performing to such a huge audience in front of work my own company had created was a real kick.

DeLiverinGThe project was actually a standard-def piece. I remem-ber this surprising us because one would assume that

video displayed so large would require HD at least. We initially rendered lots of test pieces and encoded some H.264 previews for the client. Finally we rendered all our pieces uncompressed.

We learned a lot on this project which we’ve ap-plied to other projects since.

The mistake a lot of budding stage visual designers will make is that they will try and create a pop promo for a particular track, narrative and all, and that’s really not what’s required. The key thing is K.I.S.S – Keep It Simple Sweetie.

Obviously it’s easier to deliver a job if you’ve kept it simple, and ultimately the task is to support the per-formers, not to try and outdo them. I call it “animated wallpaper,” but in terms of screen visuals, simple equals bold, equals eye catching.

As a company we’re still growing, but our success with this film proves my own personal belief that if you’re passionate about what you do and if you’ve got the motivation, you really can achieve anything.

n

Granted, we had the rehearsal audio but this could only ever be a guide. The problem for us was, if the band played too fast or too slow, none of the visual elements would work.

So we created chorus pieces, bridge pieces, and verse pieces, each with a 3 seconds tail. These would be all be triggered individually at the right cue points by the lighting director during the performance that night.

Knowing we had chorus and verse pieces to create, we set about tailoring each composition to suit each part of the track.

Chorus pieces focused on the rock-roll-star theme, while verses pulled key lyrical phrases from the song. Each was set as a graphic and placed within the 3D space of each comp.

These sequences were complemented by more Robert Indiana-inspired graphics, many created using “3D Stroke” for animated hand-drawn stars and “Echo-space” for a lovely deep 3D repetition of star shapes.

We further treated these to many trippy effects and filters and plug-ins such as Pete Warden’s “Kaleido-scope,” one of his many free AE plug-ins, and definitely the best kaleidoscope effect out there.

There was a huge composition to make for the end, where the band goes into guitar solo overdrive with lots of feedback and vocal effects. Creating a tail out which

lasts almost as long as the song itself was one of the more difficult parts of the project.

For the end, we made a composition featuring all the best bits from the piece so far and, to create an eye-popping finale, we applied the Sapphire “Random Edit” plug-in, which basically chopped and changed 2 or 3 frame edits, increasing in speed and ferocity as the tail out progressed.

We applied a further kaleidoscopic effect in Final Cut Pro with the SlitScan plug-in, which, to be honest, is one of those effects you’d never normally have a use for.

As a last finishing touch, we topped and tailed the start and end pieces with real television interference footage. This would serve as the intro and final back-drop as the band exited the stage.

be there noWBy now we were fast approaching deadline and I was feeling even more pressure to complete the job, as my wife was due to give birth to our first son any day.

The final part of the job involved laying off all the parts to a FireWire drive, over 40GB of footage, and sending it by courier down to London.

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