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MUSIC VIDEOS www.postmagazine.com 20 POST JULY/AUG 2020 Floyd — What Do You Say Alternative artist Floyd recently released her debut video What Do You Say. The project was a collaboration between San Francisco- based production company 88spire (88spire. com) and the artist, and was awarded as a scholarship by the company, honoring friend, business partner and mentor Mike Kaney, who passed away recently from cancer. 88spire's Veronica Chung, who is a part- ner in the production company with Bryan Fong, met Floyd through a writing group and felt she was a perfect candidate for this philanthropic effort. The company donated much of their services to help make the vid- eo's concept a reality. What Do You Say features Floyd singing and playing her guitar in front of many of San Francisco's famous landmarks. The video was shot in just a single day across six loca- tions, right before the stay-at-home order was put in place. Careful planning allowed the team to capture Floyd in what looks like an abandoned city. LA-based director of photography Patrick Lawler handled the shoot, using a Red Dragon camera and cine lenses. A small Bluetooth speaker was used for playback on-location, which provided a soundtrack for Floyd to perform to while not attracting too much attention during the run & gun shoot. The shoot locations included the Bay Bridge, a local pier, a trolley car, graffiti backdrops in the Mission District, Dolores Park, the Golden Gate Bridge and a rooftop in the Russian Hill neighborhood. The edit was a collaborative effort, with Fong laying down the structure and Chung providing feedback. The edit was per- formed using Adobe Premiere, and came together over the course of a week. The team used Frame.io for review and revi- sions, with Lawler handling the final color grade. Floyd referenced some of Lawler's past music video work and wanted the project to have a bit of a retro/filmic look without it appearing dated. Film grain and vignette effects were added in the final treatment. The video was delivered via Dropbox to Floyd as a 1920x1080 H.264 file and made its debut online on June 26th. MisterWives — Rock Bottom MisterWives released their video for Rock Bottom back in April. The track represents the first song off the indie pop band's new album and features lead singer, Mandy Lee, walking through the sands and hills of a beach in California. After walking through a mirror, she is reunited with the band, which performs on a dance floor. The video initially uses bril- liant neon colors and different textures, along with dark and gray backgrounds before ultimately resolving on a pulsating dance floor. Rock Bottom was shot and graded by Jade Ehlers, who used a Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 6K for the shoot and DaVinci Resolve Studio for color correction. Production took place at a number of locations and during different times of the day, including a remote beach and in the California desert. Ehlers and his small crew had to hand-carry all of their camera gear and lighting equipment, as well as a 100-pound mirror. "We wanted to go for a darker tone, with the neon colors in the darkness that showed that light can shine through even the dark times," Ehlers explains. "The song is about showing it is more about the journey to get to the end of the tunnel than just sitting in the dark times, and the video had to capture that perfectly." The Pocket Cinema Camera 6K's high dynamic range, ability to shoot in low light and small size made it well suited for the project. "Honestly, because of how different all our scenes were, I knew we needed a camera that had great low light that would allow us to be sparing with light since this shoot had a lot of hiking involved," he notes. "The beach location was quite cra- zy, and we hiked all of the gear in, so having a small camera bag to carry everything in was great." Throughout the video, Ehlers had to adjust for very differ- ent textures and unexpected lighting problems. This included having to have Mandy Lee's bright-green, puffy dress against a gray background in the desert. Another challenge came from shooting the dance floor scenes, where the black floor was not putting out as much light as expected. To com- pensate and get the shots needed, Ehlers used the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K's 13 stops of dynamic range and dual na- tive ISO up to 25,600, along with the Blackmagic raw codec for high-quality, lifelike color images and skin tones. "Because of the bit range of the camera's sensor, I was able to qualify the dress to make it pop a bit more, which was amazing and saved me a lot of extra work. And the dance floor scenes were great but were also harder than we imagined, so we had to push the camera higher on the ISO to make it the exposure we needed. The camera gave me the power to make both of these shots pop out visually." Jen Kennedy at Lalim Edit (www.lalimedit.com) in LA cut the project using Adobe Premiere Pro. A Red camera was used for the shoot. The team shot six locations in one day.