Summer Of Love
Somewhere near Vasquez Rocks (and a ditch in Santa Clarita), a camper van unleashes a group of revelers chasing a Summer Of Love. At least that’s the vibe the director, Randal Kirk II, was hoping to capture with his latest branded piece for Night:Shift Goods. With hippie-styled attire and rainbow flares galore, as well as a guest appearance from legendary folk musician and photographer Henry Diltz, I’d say he got pretty close!
Old School meets Instagram
Summer of Love is intended to showcase Night:Shift’s home goods collection, marketed towards a diehard Doors fan base. The inspiration for the piece came from watching classic Doors music videos with Director of Photography Gordon Yould; “We felt that an ‘on the road’ vibe would capture the spirit of Jim Morison”, Randal recounts.
But in a world where everything old is new again, that fan base is shifting, and so the intent was to capture a new audience of young fans, without alienating the old timers. “I wanted to cast someone influential in a younger demo that would fit this vibe, so I cast psychedelic skater Richie Jackson, a very popular skater in the social age.”
And Richie can skate, though that’s not wholly why Randal cast him for this piece: “Richie has broken away from the core skate scene and is more of an artist using his board as a brush.” That statement dovetails one of the surreal sequences, with Richie bouncing on and off a bed draped in Doors merchandise. It’s a stunt he’s performed on Instagram to an audience that Night:Shift, through Randal, is trying to reach.
This is familiar territory for Randal, who has made his living doing promos for skate and urban clothing companies, viral videos on YouTube and Vine, and genre-bending music videos.
Throw me a camera!
Gordon had some strong opinions on recreating that 60s magic: “when I heard it was for Doors material I instantly blurted out FILM! WE NEED TO SHOOT FILM!” Luckily Randal and Gordon were on the same page: “We were tired of seeing retro pieces shot digitally with Super 8 and flare effects added in post. They’re missing the textures and magic that can be done on film. Digital flare and digital film burns can work, if you augment it with actual film.”
And to get that carefree, organic texture, Gordon decided to go experimental with the film that he used; “I had some old 400′ short ends in a shoebox and figured let’s load ‘em up and see what happens! In the end the film came out a little grainy but kinda cool considering over 10 years of heat and cold fluctuations”
Alongside the two film cameras – an S16 Aaton XTR with an Angenieux 12-240mm Zoom and a S8 Canon 814 – digital coverage came courtesy of two Sony cameras – an FS7 and a A7Sii DSLR. The subject matter and the need to capture tons of B roll necessitated two small crews shooting guerilla-style. It’s debatable which material ended up the A roll and which the B roll!
Putting it all together
When it came to the cut, the services of Andrew Polich were employed, who wrangled all the footage from the various sources. The final piece moves at a good clip, but the combination of slo-mos and longer takes ensure the audience doesn’t feel they’re on a roller coaster. It’s a fine balance, and it works really well! Randal is very vocal on the style: “It might be my ADD but I’ve always cut at a fast pace. The biggest challenge filmmakers face today is keeping the audience tuned in so they won’t grab their phones and check out something else.”
There are a lot of ‘retro’ techniques on display here – sprockets and keycode punching through the left side of the frame, blending modes used to simulate double exposures, and a cute use of multicam.
Enter the Monkey
The combination of that much material from so many different sources created certain challenges, the most glaring of which was the presence of grain, or none at all. To make the visuals flow and feel like one cohesive piece, I had one of two choices: ‘clean up’ the film a little to make it match the Sony material better, or add some texture and grit to the digital pictures to make them look more like film. As a self-confessed film fanatic (my still camera of choice is a Canon AE-1 Program), there was only ever going to be one way. For this I turned to my grain plugin of choice, Film Convert by Rubber Monkey.
Most film grain plugins I’ve used do a great job in three areas: grain profile, correct tone, and controls for applying the grain as a positive or negative effect. Let’s call these the ‘post controls’ of a film grain plugin. However, because there’s no regard for the Transfer Curve or Colourspace of the underlying footage, the applied grain often ends up looking ‘superficial’. The lack of ‘transfer controls’ means the contrast and density of the resulting image is typically off, and you need to tweak the image further to get it to the right place before you can even evaluate the grain. Cumbersome, yes, but this is what we’ve had to deal with for many years.
Film Convert takes a different approach; it gives you direct access to the ‘transfer controls’, allowing you to select both the camera and the profile used during the shoot. Once selected, the film grain is applied, and the default results are great! You can use additional controls – de facto 3-way joyballs, lift/gamma/gain and saturation – to tweak the final result. Film Convert comes in both stand-alone edition (the image above), as well as a plugin for your colour corrector or editor. I use both versions for my work.
Vintage techniques
With the grain out of the way and the blend effects in place, it was time to have some fun. In my mind, The Doors is all about experimentation, freedom and psychedelia. I wanted the grade to reflect this.
I already had a head start with some of the tricks Andrew pulled in the edit, namely using film burns and black & white flips as transitions. I loved the organic effect this had on the footage, and worked towards accentuating that.
For my base grade, I didn’t want the piece to have too much contrast, which would have given it a more ‘modern’ look. So I floated the blacks more than I usually would, and kept the mid tones and highlights a little lighter. The flash frames and film edges gave me the contrast I wanted without having to put that in the image. I also let the exposure ride, sometimes wildly, between shots, which felt more natural to me.
To push the psychedelic look, I relied on key shots and techniques; skies were given a teal, slightly electric treatment, which added to the ethereal quality. Offsetting the teal shadows and skies, I added some warm vignettes; this gives the picture a ‘faded’ look, like old photographs, and also creates colour tension between the warmth and the cooler shadows and skies.
The rainbow flares, which were achieved using practical prism and rainbow filters, were pushed further. Also with the flares, because I was pushing the mids and the highlights just that little bit more, magenta started to wring around the hot spots. Normally I would correct this, but I kept it in, sometimes even accentuating it, to get some interesting, almost cross-processed looks.
Finally for the skate scene, it was gold all the way! This was largely a matter of embracing all the variance in the native photography: the expired super 16mm film, the erratic grain, the layered film and digital effects, all as the sun was setting. I pushed tons more warmth into the shadows, flatlined the blue gain for the digital shots to get that strong yellow highlight, and added more contrast compared to the previous scenes, which gave me those strong, iconic silhouettes.
I think for this job, Gordon sums it up just perfectly: “on the day it was amazing to film with our talents and the legendary [Henry] Diltz. Randal is always great to work with and his visions are a blast to bring to life through cinematography.”
You can check out more stills by going to the Summer Of Love Gallery.
King Fantastic – “On Q”
Hip-Hop Artist King Fantastic spins the loaded gun in this daring music video as seen through the eyes of director Randal Kirk II. On Q is the follow-up to “Why? Where? What?”, a video about a maid who vandalizes the home she is tasked with cleaning while dancing to King Fantastic’s song. That video got over a million hits, so the pressure was on for Randal to deliver another blockbuster. He recalls “when I started coming up with the concept, I was fond of all the gun sounds in the audio production of the track and the sexy female vocals.” Randal eventually decided on using famous alternative pin-up models, engaged in a game of Russian strip roulette. “The song glorifies the gangster lifestyle. My message in the video is that you love the lifestyle so much you that you die for it and enjoy every minute!”
On Q was shot on a Red One MX camera using Zeiss Super Speed lenses. It is a pairing that a number of DPs I have worked with prefer, as they combine the softer qualities of these older lenses with the ultra-high resolution of modern cameras. Brett Pawlak elaborates: “These days for me it really comes down to the aesthetic of lenses, how they hold flares and how they shoot wide open. That is where you really see the characteristics of the lens and get interesting looks”. That is perhaps the reason why the raw images already had a natural ‘grit’ to them.
While the Red One has become a staple of music videos and commercials due to its affordability, availability and the great images it can expose, Brett also explains that “it is a camera that I know well, and there is no question as to what it can do when pushed. It’s very good at holding saturation, and since Randal was looking for a pop look, I picked the Red as I knew that it would POP”.
Brett’s lighting package consisted of a couple of 4x Kinos, 2′ Kinos and a handful of Par Cans. “Those lights give me the most variety that I know I can work with, on a budget”. He also had some HMIs and regular tungsten units, but prefers open-faced lights over fresnels: “I’d rather start with more light since I can always diffuse and shape with flags. An open-faced 2K is close to the output of a 4K, so when you need light, on a budget, that means a whole lot!”
The Club Looks
For the Club Scene, Randal really wanted something special. He and Brett had spent some time studying a similar scene in the film “Black Swan” and concluded that those colour changes were being achieved in post – “we lit [the scene] with one solid gel colour. I decided to light the club up blood-red. It wasn’t until we transcoded the footage and Brett played with the colour and achieved a rough black light colour by pulling out the red.” This gave Randal the confidence that the look they wanted could be achieved in post. Despite this, Randal still pushed for some in-camera effects, such as placing a prism over the lens to distort the image. From there the images were treated by Chad Simcox, the editor and motion graphics artist, augmenting the camera effects with a custom filter similar to a kaleidoscope effect.
This became the starting point for the four looks I would go on to create, the most interesting of which was my ‘Neon Look’. As we started to push the colours, this ended up being Randal’s favorite look in the entire video!
I started out by setting my contrast level, with my blacks pretty rich to play against the saturated colours I was planning on creating. The second step was the interesting one, which basically added a ton of blue to the highlights and a good amount to the mid tone. This skewed the already present red towards a magenta tone, creating some interesting interactions between the original red and the added blue.
Now, with a new ‘electric’ base, I picked a broad range of reds/magentas as the inputs colours and boosted the saturation by over 300%. This made the cooler foreground stand out against the much warmer ‘background’. The next step was a technique that I use from time to time: ‘phased vignettes’. This is the name I give to a vignette which has had it’s hue (phase) rotated. I pulled the red background almost back to my manufactured blue and darkened it. An additional layer of colour boosting the saturation really made the colours pop, much to Randal’s satisfaction!
Glamorizing Violence
Randal was clear with his crew from the start: “I wanted the Russian roulette scene to feel like a room that Dexter would make, but with showy lighting to glamorize the violence.” That location ended up being a grimy dark dungeon of a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles. The desire to beautify the violence went as far as the instructions he gave to JusticeFX, the guys doing the VFX. Randal jokes “these kids are incredible. I told them I wanted realistic violence while making it sexy. That’s a hard task to do. These guys really nailed it though!”
For me, it was about creating colour tension, which is something I have written about before. I wanted the warehouse to feel cooler, so I pushed a ton of blue across the board while pulling down hard on the blacks. The saturation in the blue created an almost electric look, while the deep blacks gave the feel that the performers were coming out of the shadows.
From there onwards I treated it like a ‘beauty’ video, focussing on soft, healthy skin tones for the models, creating natural glows around the highlights in their faces and hair, while bringing out the detail in the intricate tattoos they were each adorned with. The juxtaposition between the cool environment and warm and inviting faces creates drama, which is what this music video is all about.
On Q was intended to be a viral video created to promote the brand. Because of the graphic and violent content, it would never air on TV, but Randal is not particularly concerned since he designed it to live on Vimeo. Brett broadly agrees: “If the only version that exists lives on the internet, then that is where it belongs.” This train of thought is not necessarily consigned to just music videos, as our industry shifts from a broadcast-style way of distributing content to niche-casting, delivered either by streaming platforms like Netflix or Hulu, or directly from the web itself through sites such as YouTube and Vimeo.
You can check out the final music video on Vimeo and more stunning visuals by visiting the Gallery.
For more work from the creative team, please visit their respective websites: Randal Kirk, Brett Pawlak and Chad Simcox.
Milton Adamou 