Natalie D-Napoleon is a singer/songwriter friend of ours. She's originally from Australia but currently living in Santa Barbara. We've seen her play at a few different venues around here and her latest album has been my go-to choice for family-friendly, living room listening lately. The song she's playing above is a cover of a song written by The National, one of my favorite bands from the last decade.
This project is less a music video and more of a recording of a live performance. The idea behind it was to do something simple, informal, off-the-cuff. The immediacy of it was uncharacteristic for me. The first time I heard Natalie's version of the song was during our first take of recording it. I didn't get a look at the recording space until 15 minutes prior to that. The editing was done during limited free time over six days. It has more in common with my Bud Light Film Crew work than something like my "Fake Empire" music video (another song by The National, by the way).
This is the first video I made with my new Canon 6D, and it was meant to be a kind of test, not only of the equipment but also of my skills, seeing as I hadn't done anything with video in over three years. This was a modest restarting point, but I'm hoping to step things up with increasingly complex productions, possibly more with Natalie if she's interested. There has been some talk of bringing her band members into the mix. We'll see.
I didn't want the camera work or editing to distract from the performance. Originally the style was going to be even more minimalistic -- I wanted to limit the whole thing to two takes and call it good -- but I lost my confidence at the last minute and decided I needed more coverage. I'm not sure I like the combination of handheld and tripod shots and kind of wish I stuck to one or the other. It was a case of not having a clear vision of what I wanted and the results feel somewhat compromised by doing it both ways.
I hate to concentrate on the negative, but in order to learn from the experience, I want to document the major flaws in the video (this way I can beat you to the punch):
- Audio is distorted at peaks. This is my biggest regret from the shoot. I misjudged how loud Natalie would get. We could have avoided the problem with a proper sound check. Or I could have used the automatic settings for audio capture. The problem with auto sound, however, is the levels are equalized. It brings the quiet parts up and loud parts down so it all meets in the middle. Is a more dynamic experience worth the distortion? Probably not. I'll stick to manual settings next time but need to set the levels lower.
- Lips/guitar out of sync with music. Ideally, we would have recorded the song in a studio, had it properly mixed, and then played it back while Natalie sings along. The second best option would have been to have her listening to a click track so that the song was played at the same exact tempo for each take. But we didn't use either of those methods. She played the song five times, and I used the audio track from the second take. She did a fantastic job of recreating the performance (movements, eye line, etc) each time, but unfortunately the beat was not consistent. While editing, I couldn't hold a shot of her singing for more than a few seconds without her lips becoming obviously out of sync with the words.
- Changing light. We recorded for nearly two hours late in the day and it was difficult to compensate for a quickly moving sun. I made some adjustments to my aperture settings as I went (shutter speed and ISO settings had to stay the same throughout), and I attempted to color correct every shot afterward (which made me realize how little I know about color correction). But I wasn't able to overcome the changing light and colors in the room. I probably could have covered it up and given it a more consistent look by adding some kind of filter in post-production, but I wanted it to look as natural as possible.
- Camera shake and out-of-focus. This was a bigger challenge for me than I expected. I shot three of the five takes hand held, with a really shallow depth of field. The Canon 6D does not have an auto focus while shooting video. It was very difficult to hold the focus and also make any kind of motion smooth. It was hard to tell if/when I even was in focus. I want to make a magnifier for my viewfinder. I also got my old shoulder mount out of the closet and plan to use it next time.
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