Airbourne – “Bottom Of The Well”

Australian hard rock band Airbourne give it everything they have in this music video, which pits two unlikely contestants against each other.

The music video was shot by Salvador Lleo in Los Angeles on a Red One MX camera using Zeiss T2.1 lenses. Four main setups – the band’s performance, the two contrasting training scenes and the final boxing match – were given a distinct look.

Hot and Cold

Every good boxing match is preceded by training scenes of the boxers preparing for the fight. To accentuate the different training styles and psychology of the fighters, we decided on two contrasting looks: a warmer, more natural look for ‘Average Joe’ Washowsky, while going for an uninviting, fluorescent-lit feel for Rich ‘The Machine’ Ballard. It’s always easier to push an image towards a specific look when it’s already leaning in that direction.

For the warmer scenes, I used the joyballs to push some red in the shadows and yellow in the mid tones. This gave the image an overall warm feel but kept the highlights clean. I then used a luminance map to select just the blacks, pulling down the gamma and desaturating them. I usually try not to use the lift when targeting just the blacks because I like to retain some of the subtle details in the shadows. Finally, any greens or blues were neutralised by bringing down the saturation and density.

For the cooler look, I started off by reducing the gamma and snapping the highlights to add contrast. Whenever you have fluorescent lighting in a scene, usually just adding contrast will bring out some of that green in the image. I went further by pushing cyan in the gain, but cooling off an image in this way can inadvertently tint highlights in an unnatural way. The way I fixed this was by using a hicon to key back to the base layer and recover some of the original colour.

Both of these treatments worked very well on most of the shots, with very few tweaks needed to even them out.

A Guinness Moment

The climax of this music video is the boxing match between ‘Average Joe’ and ‘The Machine’. The boxing ring was built on a stage, and lit with nine 6K skylights using 4×8 bounce cards for fill light. This gave the images a very cinematic feel.

Both Salvador and the Director initially wanted a black and white look reminiscent of Raging Bull. I’m a big lover of Black and White photography, but felt that it would feel pretentious for this application. However, I understood the desire for a classic style, and suggested a ‘weathered’ look along the lines of those UK Guinness commercials from the nineties. Going more in this direction would give us the same ‘classic’ feel, without having to get rid of all the colour!

I used a different technique for this one. The idea came from some cross-processing experiments I was trying out a few weeks earlier using the Curves in PhotoForge2 – a cool little iPad app.

After desaturating the overall image, I brought down the density to hide a lot of the spectators in the background and bring out the boxer. I then used RGB curves to push contrast into the Red and Green channels, while at the same time applying an inverse contrast curve to the Blue channel. This has the effect of cooling off the low to mid range, while keeping the highlights (skin tones) unaffected. Curves are great in that you can easily slide the points along the scale, until you literally ‘mix’ in the colour you want. The end result is almost a monochromatic version of the original image. However, unlike a black and white treatment, this look retains a lot of the subtleties of the original colour.

After establishing the look, it’s down to finessing; I used an asymmetrical shape to sink the boxer further into the darkness, animating it off as he lunges forward. I also then decided to bleed back some of the original blue and red from the fighters’ boxing gloves, adding a little spice to the ‘tinted’ look. You can see some examples of this in the Gallery.

You can watch the HD version of “Bottom Of The Well” on YouTube.