Miles Fisher – “New Romance”

Miles Fisher rounds up his “Final Destination 5” co-stars for his pop single “New Romance”, paying homage to the 90s TV classic “Saved by the Bell”, complete with death-inducing falling lockers and razor-sharp flying records! Directed by Dave Green and shot by Benji Bakshi, the music video spoof is part of Warner Bros. online viral marketing campaign for the movie.

Shot in a single day at Red Studios in Hollywood, it seems appropriate that the camera of choice was the Red One MX, combined with a Cooke Varatol 18-100 zoom lens. This was a single day shoot, and although Dave storyboarded the entire music video, the cast and crew had to move fast to get all the coverage. Zooms are essential in this respect, and came in handy when also pulling off those cheesy zooms!

For lighting, Benji did a great job of lighting the set to look like a 90s sitcom. He used 20 4K supersoft lights, 5 6K spacelights, and relied on Source 4 Leikos for accent. “We built our own grid and rigged all the lighting to an Expression 2 dimmer board for control and practical dimming gags. We prelit all 3 sets so we could meet our schedule”. A few supersofts on stands to move around for fill lights rounded up the lighting package.

Bubble-Gum Look

For New Romance, Benji wanted the images to have a real poppy, bubble-gum look, which in my world translates to bright, saturated colours with warm and healthy skin tones. The debayered image (see below) provided a good starting point, with a rich palette and plenty of fill light to help replicate that classic sitcom look Benji was after. I was happy when I looked at the images and didn’t see any clipping – not a given considering the huge range of exposure between the off white walls, chequered floor and everything in between!

I started off with a simple base grade, using master controls and the joyballs to establish some cleans blacks and highlights. This got rid of some of the green residue I could see creeping into the highlights and the mid tones. From there on it was all about finessing; using a nifty tool called Revolver I was able to quickly qualify up to 10 colours and boost their saturation, swing the hue and generally lower the brightness to bring out the richness in the primaries. Generally with a look like this I prefer to blast the reds, greens, blues and purples, being a little more careful with the reds and yellows, which is where the skin tones sit.

The ability to key back to any colour layer is very important, especially to recover skin tones, shadows and highlights. For this music video I ended up creating different layers to treat each element separately. This was essential for achieving warm but realistic skin tones, as well as for pulling back the clipped walls and floor, a by-product of my attempt to keep the image bright and cheerful. I’m a firm believer of simplicity, but sometimes the simplest looks end up being the toughest to achieve. Having that kind of flexibility gives you a lot of flexibility.

You can check out more stills in the Gallery.

To see more examples of Benji’s work, visit his website.