Justin Bieber – “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”
Justin Bieber gets into the festive spirit with this theatrically released music video, timed to coincide with the animated feature “Arthur Christmas”. Directed by Charles Oliver and shot in a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, the music video meshes a Steampunk version of Santa’s Grotto complete with wind-up dolls reminiscent of the classic birthday party scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This was my first time working with this creative team, and an ideal opportunity to combine my skills as both a colourist and stereo specialist.
“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” was shot and released theatrically in stereoscopic 3D. This was Charles’ second project shot in this medium: “I was very pleased to work in 3D again. The first project I did in 3D was a year earlier – a piece for The League of Extraordinary Dancers (LXD) called MATCHED“. No doubt Charles’ work on “The LXD” and his own dance background was the reason why Scooter Braun, Justin’s manager, approached Charles with the project. “As a young kid, I was in musical theater and toured various countries as part of a performing group. From there, I started teaching dance for a few summers as a way to not have to work for my father’s construction company. I don’t think there is film musical made that I haven’t seen, especially the old ones.”
Camera, Lights & Stereo Rigs
Cinematographer Alice Brooks was the eye behind the lens, continuing her collaboration with Charles Oliver, which started with The LXD series. The cameras used were Red Epics paired with Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses, ranging from 20mm to 85mm. To a large extent the selection of camera came down to choice of stereo rig, which in this case was the Helios Rig provided by ParadiseFX. “It’s a great rig, very reliable. We only had it go down once on a two-day shoot, which is rare for 3D”, Alice recalls. The Red Epic’s small form factor also makes it the perfect choice for smaller, more lightweight stereo rigs, which is a good thing since 99% of the music video was shot on steadicam, with Nick Franco operating. Supervising the stereo onset was veteran stereographer Max Penner.
The camera was rated at 800 ISO and 5000 Kelvin, yielding an overall rusty warm palette in the original photography. “We were going for a desaturated, industrial feel, while intending to make the color red pop.” The warehouse itself was dressed in a very monochromatic way, with cold concrete floors and cinder blocks, but there was enough red in the costumes that I was able to isolate and create good colour contrast. However, the surrounding brick walls were also red, which I wanted to treat in order to bring the focus to the dancers. The lighting Alice designed helped hugely in this respect, giving the dancers good separation from the background: “We used lots of large backlights that were rigged in the ceiling and we skip-bounced all of our front light into the concrete floor. The floor was very dirty and the concrete was grey. It gave this really beautiful cool glow. We brought in smaller sources to cross-light and edge-light from time to time too.”
From RAW to Real
When it comes to ‘transferring’ RAW images into something that will give you flexibility in the timing suite, there are literally thousands of permutations. Answering some basic questions allows you to make the right choices at this critical stage. The most important variable for me is what the final deliverable will be, followed by the nature of the material itself. Regardless of whether you are going out to film or not, I always like to start with a Log-like image. In cases where the primary deliverable is a DCP vs. film (more and more these days), I rely on a small number of density curves I have built that emulate an Input LUT. The nature of the material dictates which curve I use to get the image to a good starting point.
For this music video, I used a REDlogFilm gamma curve and picked REDcolor over REDcolor2 as my colour space. REDcolor gives me a little more saturation in the ‘negative’, which is better than adding it later on with the potential of introducing noise. As usual, from here I established my base contrast and density level. Again, the choices here are endless, but generally at this stage I try to confine myself to using density and gain controls: limiting my options helps me get to where I am going faster.
The Steampunk Look
We tried various grades with Alice that we would present to Charles the next day. We generally pushed towards a much cooler palette, with varying degrees of blue. After experimenting with half a dozen looks, we settled on what we referred to as our ‘Steampunk Look’ – a cool, shadowy image with glowing highlights and red costumes bleeding through. Our coolness didn’t come in the form of a blue tint though, we simply added ‘white’ to the scene. Care was taken to ensure that the image didn’t feel ‘monochromatic’ by retaining enough colour in the image.
Neutralising the colours involved adding a ton of blue gain, as well as taking out blue points using printer lights (printer lights work in reverse as you are theoretically working on the negative). This got rid of the rusty tint, but left us with a desaturated image. From there I began sculpting, using a luminance key to select and suppress the shadows and low mid tones, which was also where the background fell. On the other end of the scale, I used a hicon key to pick off the highlights and really bloom them, adding both gain and defocus. For the red costumes and skin tones, I selected the upper range of reds (leaving out the darker red bricks) and slowly eased them back into the picture, pushing the saturation a little further. A final S-curve pulled it all together and gave the image more ‘snap’.
Every music video has challenges, especially when you add the element of stereo into the mix. However, not having the talent available until the day before the shoot presented a unique challenge, especially for a dance-based video. Charles approached the problem from a different angle: “we knew we would not be able to teach Justin any choreography before the day of the shoot. Alice and I worked with Tom (Production Designer) to create a space that could be broken up and shot in sections, each covering different parts of the song. Then I worked with Galen (Choreographer) to create both freestyle and tightly choreographed sections that would work in that space. The result gave us plenty of options when it came time to cutting the video. It’s actually not my preferred method of working – I would much rather create a fluid piece with contiguous choreography and have our lead in the center of that dance the whole time. But frankly, I was surprised to see how pleased I was with the result of this different approach.”
You can check out more before/after images by visiting the Gallery.
For more work from the creative team, please visit the respective websites of Charles Oliver and Alice Brooks.
Noel Gallagher – “The Death Of You And Me”
Noel Gallagher finds himself surrounded by an eclectic cast in his debut solo single “The Death Of You And Me” from the album “High Flying Birds”. Directed by Mike Bruce and lensed by cinematographer Salvador Lleo, this music video was shot out in the desert at Club Ed, Lancaster, CA. Famous for movies like Rob Zombie’s recent “The Devil’s Rejects”, the Last Chance Cafe serves as the perfect setting for a stuck-in-a-rut waitress longing for something better than her pitiful existence serving the local bizarre folk.
Salvador used the Red Epic with Zeiss T2.1 lenses for this shoot. The 5K camera is capable of capturing some striking images, and the compact size makes it ideal for use with Salvador’s latest toy – a 28 foot telescopic Technochrane. “This is the perfect tool for a new generation of lightweight cameras. It is light, steady, fast and programmable, and can be operated by a single person.”
For all the exteriors, Salvador fought hard to keep the exposure from running away under a beating sun. For the diner scenes, he resorted to a technique he refers to as ‘invisible lighting’, using soft fill light to keep the shadows from falling off too much. Since he was dealing with daylight for both locations, Salvador rated the camera at 5600K. He used an ISO of 500 for both setups.
Last Chance Cafe
For this music video I created two distinct looks: a sombre grade for the diner interior with its scary characters, versus a Van Dyke-inspired look for the exteriors as the travelling troupe passes through. In both instances I added some Grain to soften some of the sharpness you sometimes get from digital cinematography.
The diner itself had some great key light streaming through the shutters, but because these scenes were shot during midday, the overall images were very hot – the direct opposite of what I was trying to achieve! The ‘fix’ was to bring down the gain and reduce the overall contrast, while raising the gamma a little to compensate. Crashing down the pedestal by 20% kept the right amount of snap in the image. I also added some blue in the highlights to help pull back some of the red in the booths.
Another thing I used to accentuate the mood was heavy off-centre vignettes. These are great for burning off frame edges or for spotlighting people. Usually I’ll bring down the gamma but raise the gain in order to keep some highlights poking through. Varying their position and keeping the edges soft keeps them hidden and unobtrusive.
Soaking Wet
The one character I wanted to stand out from this moody backdrop was the brooding waitress. Her longing for a better life separates her from the rest of the diner’s denizens, and so I wanted to make this distinction by separating her from the background. This is where good casting and wardrobe are so important in the storytelling process, and ultimately makes the colourist’s life so much easier.
The two areas I focused on were her skin tones and her blue dress. The skin tones I kept bright and healthy by keying back to the ‘richer’ base layer, which didn’t have the low contrast treatment. This was a little tricky since there was so much red in the diner, so muting the red walls and the booths in advance helped. I also had to rely on some loose roto-splines to further qualify her face.
The blue dress was relatively easy to separate. However, instead of just applying saturation – which often knocks the selected area out of balance and introduces noise – I cranked up the contrast using an S-curve and then brought down the density a little. This approach worked particularly well once the waitress emerges from the pool all wet. The intense blue ties up with one of the Gypsies’ blue shoes, creating colour continuity between the two scenes.
Van Dyke Processing
The outside world brings with it the promise of something better in the form of a travelling gypsy troupe. For these exteriors, Mike wanted a very stylised, almost sepia feel. I liked the idea, and thought it could work well with the earthen tones in the caravan and the mules, as well as the gypsies’ clothes. I decided to try out a technique I had toyed with to replicate the rich browns found in an early printing process known as Van Dyke. This would create an almost ‘rusty’ feel with deep browns and red-tinted skies.
For this special treatment I turned to Curves. Combined with saturation, there is very little that can’t be achieved using these controls. After balancing the image with a base grade and bringing down the saturation, I started adjusting the individual RGB curves to get my Van Dyke look. To create the deep browns, I brought down the black points for both the green and blue curves, using the latter to control how much brown I wanted to mix into the shadows. For the red curve I ended up creating five points: points two and four were brought down while point three was brought up. In the end the red curve looked like a Double-S. This alternating approach keeps the reds in check, and ultimately creates a more interesting image. The blue and green curves were used to control the overall contrast.
Finally, to give the troupe an extra whimsical dimension, I qualified the red shirts, instruments and the blue shoes and ramped up the saturation. As the gypsies move closer towards us, our eye catches more and more flashes of colour, hinting at the life and excitement they bring to this otherwise dull world.
You can check out more stills from “The Death Of You And Me”, visit the Gallery.
Salvador Lleo’s personal website can be found here.
Stay tuned for the next installment. Coming soon…
We The Kings – “Friday Is Forever”
Cruising down the Sunset Strip in a Rock-N-Roll speedboat are punk band We The Kings. This music video was shot by prolific cinematographer Salvador Lleo over the course of two gloomy days in LA.
For this music video, Salvador used no less than three types of cameras – a vanilla Red One, an upgraded Red One and two Canons, a 5D and 7D. In terms of lenses, Salvador shot the band on the boat using anamorphic lenses, before switching to spherical lenses for the night party scene. The Canons were used for pick-ups.
Anamorphic Twist
When you think of anamorphic lenses, Panavision’s Primos or Hawk lenses usually come to mind. How about a set of High Speed 1.4 Lomo Anamorphic lenses, with markings in metres instead of feet? Enough said. “American ACs really love them”, Salvador jokes. He decided to go anamorphic for the exteriors out of practicality – two words you usually don’t find in the same sentence. “They work out great for a small boat crammed full of people!” Indeed.
It figures that in a city known for its perpetual sunlight, both days of the shoot were completely overcast, but then again everyone round here knows that ‘June Gloom’ really starts in May. Nevertheless, the pictures needed to feel sun-drenched and pop!
For all the ‘speedboat driving’ scenes, I started my base grade by adjusting contrast and density, slightly clipping the boat and keeping it white, then bumping the saturation to see where the colours fell. Saturating an image quickly exposes its temperature, and you can use this information as a guide to achieving your look with the joyballs. In my case I wanted hot and sunny, so I pushed a lot of yellow into the blacks and red into the mid tones, which turned the skin tones golden and gave the trees some life. I then added blue in the gain to counter some of the red contamination I was getting in the road. Because I had clipped the boat with my contrast, I didn’t have to worry about my whites going blue – a risky technique that can work with some careful planning.
To erase any remnants of an overcast day, I qualified the sky and added some blue, and then saturated the greens and the blues to further bring out the trees and the sky. I then qualified the model’s bikini and warmed it up to match her skin tones. Overall, a straight-forward look that instantly transforms the grey raw images into sunny LA, June Gloom or not!
Low-Light Shooting
Salvador chased the speedboat from the streets of Culver City to Downtown LA, up to Hollywood Boulevard and the Sunset Strip and all the way to the ocean, then back to Culver City for the Party scene. As he lost light, he switched from the anamorphic Lomos to the spherical Zeiss lenses, shooting wide open while bumping up the ISO from 320 to 800 (Red One MX) and 500 (Red One) to compensate for the critical low light.
For the ocean drive (above), I spent most of my time re-distributing the light. You can see from the Before image in the Gallery that the band are pretty dark, and overall the image lacks contrast. A quick application of an S-curve snaps the blacks and brings out the boat nicely, while a healthy dose of blue printer lights floods the image with ‘twilight’. A soft inside/outside vignette is used to burn off the left edge and bring out the band. Finally, a skin tone qualification brings back some warmth in the band’s faces.
To visit We The Kings official website, click here.
Salvador Lleo’s website can be found here.
Milton Adamou 