Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/161463
posting music videos Creating imperfect look for 'My Girl' LOS ANGELES — Mark Osborne (www.marktoddosborne.com) spends most of his time making things perfect for his clients, who consist of DPs and directors that want and need clean and beautiful shots without a blemish or any slightly-off color pixel anywhere within shouting distance of the final cut. And occasionally, he works with clients that want things to look as ragged as possible. That was the case when Osborne color corrected Willy Moon's new music video, My Girl. Willy Moon is a growing music sensation from New Zealand (if you saw the ubiquitous bouncing iPod ads from the holidays in 2012, you have heard Willy Moon), and the director for the music video wanted a look that could be described as ragged yet filmic. Osborne is a freelance colorist who has worked on nearly every professional color correction system out there. He is a longtime DaVinci Resolve artist, from Resolve 2K to the current Resolve, and when he was presented with the opportunity to work on My Girl, Resolve was his tool of choice. Working with the Los Angeles office of the Foundation Content post house, which provided all of the music video's post production and color correction, Osborne colored My Girl on a Resolve Linux system, which included a Resolve control surface. "The director of My Girl first came to me and told me to make the whole video look ragged. Raw and gritty with a VHS and Super 8 feel, but it also had to still maintain a filmic and professional look," says Osborne. "In parts of the video, the director wanted to get the look of a VHS tape gone bad, and I had to add artifacts that worked with his artistic vision as well as with the beat of the song. Most of the time, I have to make things look perfect, and now, I had to concentrate on doing the exact opposite. But the great thing with Resolve is that it's powerful enough to easily let me go in any creative direction." In My Girl, Willy Moon walks down various streets, alleyways and inside dark rooms, while his love romps around carefree and happy in the sunlight. Osborne had to maintain the look and feel the director wanted while working with near constant movement and transitions from well lit outside scenes to flashing lights in dark rooms. To achieve this, he used Resolve's tracking, soft clip and custom curves features extensively. Using Resolve's soft clip feature, Osborne was able to adjust highlights and shadows per clip. For outside shots where sunlight and direct shots of the sun impacted the image, he was able to adjust each image quickly and to exactly what the scene and director called for, easing off any harsh loss of detail that occurred when the sun blew out highlights. Another area Osborne benefitted from Resolve's control was in curve grading. Curve grading lets colorists adjust colors on a curve graph, controlling high and low clips per node and setting high and low clip softness. With Resolve's custom curves, he was able to build his own subtle control into each correction, letting him make specific, creative adjustments to images. This allowed Osborne to create a set of color schemes that fit with the unique VHS/Super8 look and then reuse that curve, saving time and letting him be as efficient as possible. "In the video, when people moved, the director wanted it to leave digital artifacts with lags, blurs and what looked like a degradation of a VHS tape. But, it still had to keep a natural filmic look throughout. What could have been a very difficult process was made easier thanks to Resolve," Osborne continues. To get these looks, he created a set of custom curves and looks that worked perfectly with the movement of Willy Moon and his girl. "I used the curves to create the degradation and flat look throughout." For the lag looks in particular, which included ghosting images of Willy Moon as he danced, Osborne relied on Resolve's motion tracker. 26 Post • August 2013 www.postmagazine.com Adam Donald on the clip, which is a montage of colors, typography, graphics and shots of Gordon on city streets. T-K-O appears in outline letters filled with colors and images; lyrics and lyric fragments vibrate and flash on-screen in different type fonts that reinforce Gordon's high-energy performance. Sabatino is a commercial editor who takes on short films and music videos whenever possible. He enjoyed the creative freedom that TKO offered, and when the artist came on-board near the end of the process, it was to contribute a few new ideas, but nothing that affected the overall aesthetic he had established with the director and his colleague O'Donnell. Adam Donald used Red Epic to capture Gordon performing to the sync track in different New York City locations; there was no separate narrative line. He had an idea of adding typography to the images and showed Sabatino and O'Donnell some Kanye West videos with type treatments. The editors, in turn, referenced the pulsating typography of the opening title sequence of the film, Enter the Void. The type design "evolved as we played with the footage and text," says Sabatino. "Zeke created all the text elements and designed the colors and fonts in After Effects. I used them as raw elements and did the matting and compositing in Final Cut." Sabatino ended up "pushing the text" more than he anticipated. "I didn't think it would be that frenetic," he says. "I was originally going to use it sparingly, but with Wynter's intense track, I realized that pushing it was the way to go." Because Sabatino was "creating the aesthetic" as he went along he felt he "needed to know if the type was going to work before we got to four minutes" and the end of the video. So he decided to work section by section "and really finesse it," which was not the usual workflow. "I'd ask Zeke to give me a font in a bigger size, a different color, a different stroke," he explains. "Then, if it worked, I could fill in the rest of the piece with different footage and texture so I wasn't reusing the same elements over and over." He tapped a lot of "found footage," such as stock footage of highways, and used it as texture to fill in the outline type. Sabatino also did all the color grading himself using Red Giant Software's Magic Bullet Looks. "Color affected the way the text was integrated into the video and the different composites and transitions, so it was easier to do it myself," he says. "It gave me more creative freedom."