Music Video »Angry Young Man« for Artist »Get Well Soon«

2010-02-25T01:13:46Z

In November and December 2009 the team of the Bildundtonfabrik worked on the new music video for artist Get Well Soon. The outcome is a philosophical piece on mankinds attemps to fight and control nature.

I can't remember exactly how we had the idea, but the visual style of Lars von Trier's Antichrist was definately an important inspiration for us. We saw the movie in a small cinema in Cologne and were amazed about the highspeed shots and the color look of the movie.

Preproduction began in the end of October, while screening Der Tag An Dem Herrn Müller Einfach Nichts Einfallen Wollte on the 32. Biberacher Filmfestspiele on the 31. Filmfestspiele in Biberach. During the days, when there were no films to go to, we brainstormed a lot about the project and finally visited a beautiful forest not far from Philipps hometown. It was that forest that gave us confidence for our ideas.

Back in Cologne we started to tighten everything and began the official production. The were several very difficult decisions to make. One of the most difficult decision was the decision of our production format. Our idea was to shoot on S16mm or S35mm, but our budget was tight and we were thinking about switching to a digital system like the RED. Everyone recommended to shoot digital, but somehow we were not happy with that approach. It took a lot of time and many hours of budget planning, but in the End we decided to shoot on S16mm and S35mm ;-)
The next very difficult thing was our idea to shoot everything on minimum 50-75fps and two special shots on 1000fps. We knew the Phantom HD and the WeissCam, but theses systems are extremely expensive and the film rentals in Cologne couldn't make us a good offer. That was a big problem for us, because the majority of our concept was based around these ultra highspeed shots.
So we began an intense research and found Norbert, a guy specialised on highspeed crash test and nature shots. He supported us with the PCO Dimax camera system, which is basically the same as the Weisscam HS-2, but a little more complicated to use.

Production DAY 1 // Nov. 19

We began with the highspeed shots of the kids and the bird. We built our set in the garden of the KHM and used a backdrop and a bush to let it look like it was in the forest. It turned out to work very well using the printed backdrop. I had some concerns about the color matching later in post, but we had so much color detail in the footage that it worked.
The slingshot shot was a little dangerous, because the actor had to aim directly on the lens of the camera, but we constructed a safety box around the camera and shot through thick glass.

The small packshot set needed a lot of light for the highspeed camera.

Alex in front of the backdrop.

Production DAY 2 // Nov. 20

Day two was our first day with animals at the Wildgehege Hellenthal. It was an about 1:30h drive from Cologne. We did not work with so many different animals before, so we were a little afraid of the situation. We had no animal trainers. The deal was to go into the enclosure and work everything out by ourselves. That was a huge risk when considering that we were shooting on S16mm at 75-150fps!
In the end we were very lucky and managed to bait them with some food :-)

The deer park

After shooting with deers, goats, racoons, ferrets, and roe deers we switched over to falcons and owls. The park had a special bird of prey section and the supported us very kindly. We shot a falcon ripping a dove, which they usually use bird food. Later on we shot with Hugo the owl. Because they were all trained birds, it turned out to very comfortable to shoot with them. They were doing precisely what the trainers wanted!

The bird trainer, Hugo the owl an me

Philipp checking a place for the falcon to start from.

Production DAY 3 // Nov. 21

Again we spent day three in Hellenthal shooting with two teams in two different locations. Team one was shooting with the actors in a nearby forest on the big S35mm camera and team two was in the deer park shooting on S16mm some of the animals we did not manage to shoot the day before.
The logistics of that day were very complex. There was always a car somewhere on the dirt road between the two sets. We learned a lot about how to manage two camera units and all what they need to shoot.

Unit one on production in Hellenthal.

Unit two shooting with animals again.

Production DAY 4 // Nov. 22

On day four we relocated everything to a forest near Windeck, Kreis Sieg. Again it was a 1:30h drive from Cologne, but to a completely different direction. Just like Hellenthal we visited this location about a week before production. We got the forester's address from the Anitchrist production manager, so in the end, we were shooting in the same forest as Lars von Trier did.
In the morning of day four we began everything so early, that we did not have enough light to start shooting :-) . During the day we had a lot of rain and so everyone and everything was soaking wet and full with mud. In Hellenthal we were a bit more lucky with the weather and lighting conditions.

Creating fog.

Unit one shooting a running scene.

As nearly every day, day four ends when the sun goes down. Unfortunately that was already at about 16:30, so there is not very much time to shoot on one day. But somehow we managed to shoot everything we needed.

Production DAY 5 // Nov. 23

Day five, our last day of production, was divided into three parts/locations. We shot the majority of the day in the forest in Windeck and as the sun went down we moved to a little pub in Windeck to shoot the old man singing. After that we drove to a dive centre in Siegburg where we shot the underwater scenes.
During our preproduction we found a nice location in the forest. The ruins of an old gunpowder factory look really beautiful through the camera. We finally shot the climbing and some running sequences there.

The crew shooting some last shots.

Director Philipp and artist Konstantin.

The 20m deep dive pool.

We decided shooting in the dive center, because there we had the chance to shoot through a window at a depth of about three meters. Hence we could save a lot of money we would have spent for underwater housing equipment. But still, the shooting turned out to be very difficult, due to the angle Konstantin had to jump in. It was very narrow and so we had to practice many times before we could actually roll the camera. At about 23:30 of our longest day we finished the production of the music video!

Postproduktion // Nov. 25- Dez. 7

Just one day after the exhausting production marathon, we continued with the postproduction. Therefore we first had to gather all of our footage which was mostly analogue but there were also some digital clips and still photos from our 5D MK 2. Philipp, Jakob and me drove down to Baden-Baden to scan our footage. Once again we did our standard film workflow. The S16mm and S35mm footage was scanned at 25fps directly onto HDCAM SR and 10bit Apple Prores HQ files. The tapes were actually just a backup solution, just in case something happens.
Back in Cologne Philipp started editing everything while Julian and I were already working on several composites. We did a lot of complex stuff, like to the bird shot, where we gave life to the dead bird. There were also a lot of removals to do.

Bluescreen elements.

On our 5D the 2. Unit team shot several small animals like grasshoppers, a mouse and a rat in front of a bluescreen. We composited these elements in the foreground or background of the final clips.
Overall there was a lot of compositing to do for this project, but everything we managed to accomplish on our own.

After about two weeks of postproduction we mastered the video and passed it over to the label. Again one week later it was released on tape.tv and youtube.

Reactions

We receive very positive reactions about this video. The people recognize the distinctiveness of this video and discuss it heavily on the web. Many people ask how the bird shot was done and think that we used a living bird for it! I hope now no one thinks that any more.
Altogether I think we can be very proud of our creation and of what we learned by making it. I hope we'll have the chance to do this kind of project again in the future! The next time we will not shot in a rainy November, with animals and kids, with only 7 hours of light and everything on film at 75-150fps!
What we did was insane and we were not very far from a failure, but again somehow we did it!

Shortly after our release on Tape.tv and Youtube the blog Feingut contacted me with some questions about the music video and posted an article with my answers about the project.

A BIG thanks to every team member and everyone who helped us during this project!

The entire gallery

iTunes Library Management

2009-10-20T22:41:22Z

iTunes does a great job in playing music. Once your library is set up iTunes works like charm, at least on a mac. But when you want to keep a custom folder structure or manage unsorted or badly tagged mp3 files iTunes really sucks.

There is a whole bunch of mp3 files with really bad ID3 tags in my music folder (which by the way is from a time when Winamp was almost the only way to playback mp3 files). Then some CDs were ripped without connection to the CDDB, thus have only the artist and album field tagged. Furthermore the aforementioned Winamp does a great job displaying files which do not contain any ID3 data. Which of course results in files without any data in iTunes – especially if you simply drop them into iTunes without switching off library management! Bad idea.

Since quite a while now I am working on cleaning up my iTunes library. I am following a strategy of small steps. Every time I stumble upon a badly or incompletely tagged file I take my time to correct and complete all the data.

On my way to the pedanticly uncluttered library I came across some helpers which saved me a lot of time – perhaps you already know them, they were new to me!

TriTag

TriTag converts filenames to ID-Tags and vice versa. You can define a pattern which then will be translated into ID3 tags. Before you apply your pattern you will get a preview, even a Pattern builder is included (though you won't need it)! This tool is so damn helpful, I can hardly imagine how I managed managing my music all these years without having a tool like this at hand.

Get the tool at the developers site:
http://www.feedface.com/software/tritag.html

MP3 Scan+Repair

Some of my mp3 files were rejected by iTunes, no matter wether I tried importing them via file menu or just dropped them into my library. Re-encoding of mp3 files is no solution, since you're loosing sound quality. Finder and VLC played the affected files just fine, but my Console caught an error thrown by VLC during playback of the bad files: org.videolan.vlc: [mp3 @ 0x8b7a10]Header missing
The fact that obviously my files were missing some important information, suggested to alter my search pattern from blaming iTunes for rejecting my files to how to repair mp3 files.
This finally led me to MP3 Scan+Repair (previously named MP3 Validator) which solved the problem faster than I could imagine.

Get MP3 Scan+Repair at the developer's site:
http://triq.net/mac/mp3-validator-mac-os-x

Get Lyrical

Okay, this last one is not really needed, but it does a great job completing your meta information! Get Lyrical automatically fetches lyrics from http://lyrics.wikia.com/ and saves them in the lyrics field of iTunes. This is especially nice if you own an iPhone which displays the lyrics on your standby screen during playback!

Get Lyrical is available at:
http://shullian.com/get_lyrical.php

You can download the three tools for free. Please consider to make a donation to the developers. In particular as these tools might save you quite a lot of time!

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