UKC

Well, I've done it again and volunteered to do something that I have never attempted before.

This time there is a band at work that have asked me to make a promo video and I said yes please.

I would be grateful for any links to YouTube's of music videos that I could emulate using a camcorder and a gopro or two.

The band have a sound engineer to compensate for my rode mic.

Also any tips on how to set up and film such a project would be great.

A while ago somebody posted a link to a band playing in the ground floor of a house. All the instrument wires were on the floor. There were Christmas tree lights on the walls.

The whole thing looked rustic but visually spot on. Problem is, I can not remember the name of YouTube link.

Doh

In reply to The Lemming:

my first thought was... you need to learn how to say no, lol

that's quite a project... is it a full song / single or just a wee (30 second for example) promo?

if you can keep the scene reasonably well lit, then the gopro would probably be "fine" for wide shots. i say fine but the barrel distortion is so much more noticeable indoors than out because of the abundance of straight lines inside. go wide and crop?

does it have to be done in one take or are the good enough to play the same thing several times in a row the same?
you want to record the sound all the way through at lease once i'd have thought, sound is actually much harder t oget right than most of us camera pointers like to admit. hopefully the sound guy can help, might be worth renting a wee zoom recorder and taking a line straight out the mixer as well as using the ambient sound from your videomic

if you look at videos of similar bands for how they are often shot ie wide > mid > tight > repeat

other than that i'd suggest maybe borrowing one of them and practice on them in your preferred location (or stunt doubles / stand ins if you can't get the actual band)
shot from different positions and playback immediately to see what works and what to tweak.

GOOD LUCK!

In reply to rallymania:

As for sound capture, I have a zoom H2, a lave and a rode stereo mic.

Got the basics just need the talent.

In reply to The Lemming:

I don't know if this is the kind of thing your looking for?

youtube.com/watch?v=-3ZUQMBD5yI&

A big red rug and atmospheric lighting.. and what a performance! What a tune..

In reply to broken spectre:

That sort of setup, minus the professional cmeras and stellar musicians would be fab.

In reply to The Lemming:

>As for sound capture, I have a zoom H2, a lave and a rode stereo mic.

Lay down a CD quality audio track on the computer and use that as the audio track.

When the band 'play' what really happens is that you play their tune through a stereo, then film them miming to the music. You then sync their miming with the audio you have on the computer. As you don't have smpte time code, their mime and the audio on the computer will drift out of sync. To compensate, you cut away to another shot, then cut back to a point where they are in sync. Only use the audio you capture as a way of getting their miming in sync with the audio track. The audio you capture with a mic, will sound crap compared to a studio produced track.

Film them miming to their track a dozen times in interesting places. Film grave yards/ flowers / kittens etc as appropriate to use when cutting between scenes if needed. Get some good vid editing software and glue it all together.

If they haven't got a decent quality recording of their song, then no amount of messing with camcorders will make it sound better.