Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/398272
www.postmagazine.com 4 POST OCTOBER 2014 WOLF BITE VIDEO DRAWS UPON BLACKMAGIC TOOLS FREMONT, CA — The music visualizer of Owl City's new track "Wolf Bite" was shot on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera (EF) and color graded on DaVinci Resolve 11. The video is one of the fi rst projects to be fi nished us- ing the newest version of Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve application. Following hits like "Firefl ies," "Vanilla Twilight," and the Carly Rae Jepsen duet, "Good Time," Owl City's latest track comes from the recently-released Ultraviolet EP. The Wolf Bite video features people dressed as wolves, riding bikes and dancing throughout the streets around New York City. Shot by DP Tim Buttner and directed by Andrew William Ralph, the video contains dramatic artistic elements, harsh and low lighting, and a number of visual eff ects. "When I spoke with Andrew lead- ing up to the video shoot, we talked about the look being pretty artistic and open, considering he was going to do some stylized animations over it," recalls Buttner. "The fi rst thing he asked was for me to shoot the moon; however, the full moon had just passed. Luckily, I had shot the full moon over the winter in RAW at 24fps on my Blackmagic Cinema Camera for my own purposes. This gave us a great shot of the moon to start with and set the frame rate for the project." The nighttime bicycle shots proved to be challenging due to lighting restrictions. To get the footage, Buttner sat with the camera on the back of a moving vehicle with a work light shooting out from underneath him. While recording the timelapse footage, Buttner used the Blackmagic Cinema Camera to capture out of fo- cus lights to be used later in the video as an overlay eff ect. "We were happy that the Black- magic Cinema Camera did very well in low light, even at 800 ASA," says Buttner. "I decided not to go above 800 ASA to ensure little to no noise, and in post I pushed the exposure a bit more by roughly a half stop. A lot of the street lights gave a nice look on the road, but I emphasized that in DaVinci Resolve." For the scenes with the dancers, Buttner employed actual car head- lights. According to Buttner, they were bright enough and the camera was so good in low-light situations that they were able to pull off the shots without any cinema lights. Buttner also used the Blackmagic Cinema Camera to shoot the footage of a wolf mask with glowing eyes that appears overlaid in certain shots. He shot the mask against a greenscreen that he then keyed out so that he could do a glow eff ect inside the mask's eyes. "The quality provided by the Blackmagic Cinema Camera made that job so easy, especially the extra pixels from the 2.5K resolution for masking the shape of the eyes for the glow eff ect," says Buttner. "Overall, I love using the Blackmagic Cinema Camera because the footage looks so amazing. It's so aff ordable, good in low light and easy to use, but to me the biggest selling point is the 13 stops of dynamic range and the ability to shoot RAW, which allows me to do whatever I need to do in post." During the color grade, Buttner used the VisionColor ImpulZ LUTs on a few shots as a base starting point, and then used the Power Windows and color picker in Resolve 11 to em- phasize various elements. "DaVinci Resolve 11 allowed us to give the bicycle sequences a dis- tinct look compared to the danc- ers," he says. "I was able to empha- size more blue tones in the dancers to contrast to the red and orange tones of the bicycle sequence. And for the bicycle sequence, I was asked to emphasize the wolf's fur by making it more of a brownish red color, and being able to pick that specific part of the image and use a Power Window to track the head was great." Once the color grade was fi nished, he exported the fi les to be edited. Per the client's request, the fi nished project was delivered to BitMAX in Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) 23.98fps in 1920x1080 resolution. BITS & PIECES Resolve was used to grade the wolf scenes more toward red and brown hues.