Wow! I wish I had your talent.

...Jerry

Brilliant work there Ray, loved every bit of it and couldn't fault it technically with only one caveat.
The money shot when Jack "buys it". Your FX guy's work just doesn't cut it. The bullet was OK but the bottle blowing up was just a cheap and nasty effort in AE and it showed. Shooting just that shot as a practical with a Phantom could have elevated the music video from just another really well done effort into something that could have gone viral.
The rest of the slomo work done with the RED overcranked looked perfect to me, any higher FPS would have been overkill, even some of it I thought was perhaps just a tad too slow.

Bob.

Thanks folks, appreciate it. Would have told the story a little different if I could have gone slower, which I wanted to, but totally happy with the way it turned out. And yea, if the Phantom had been an option would have loved to have done the bottle with it. I give a lot more credit to the fx guy than you are Farss but obviously there were limitations, working within them I think it's close enough to not distract from the story. Due to time/money limitations he had to go with a model that was available as opposed to doing it from cratch. My only real wish would be that the glass of the bottle would have been thicker but it still plays, for me anyway.

- Ray
Underground Planet

" I give a lot more credit to the fx guy than you are Farss but obviously there were limitations, working within them I think it's close enough to not distract from the story."

Sure I'm being tough. The rest of the production looks a million dollars. By that I mean even IF you had a million dollars to spend I cannot imagine anyway to make it better. You are now working on a higher plane and serious kudos to you for making that leap, it's really great to see someone from here make that jump.

Visually the first parts are just great eye candy to fill the screen, very, very nice eye candy of course. But then the guy is descending into a dark place with his mate Jack. Some violence is happening, visual tension is rising. There's a gun and oh my it sure looks real, again kudos to you for getting that right.
So someone is going to die. Bullet going through the air in slo mo, OK, guy hasn't put gun to head, the chick is going to buy it. Then comes the kick in the guts, the twist in the plot, Jack buys it instead of the girl.
That's when you lost me. It could have been a kick in the guts with some amazing high speed shot of the bottle and contents exploding into space as the girl falls back in shock. Instead I got hit with a feather.

As I said Ray, if the rest of it wasn't so darn good I wouldn't have said anything. When you're at the level you're now at and that level is as good as anything Hollywood is capable of, it all has to standup at that level. Your viewers expect Hollywood because apart from those few seconds that's what you gave them.

As an aside a couple of days ago I did watch the footage from a music video shot on a Phantom 10. What a disaster. I'd asked the DP if he was sure he had enough light and the right kinds of lights and he told me he did, the lights he was picking up were only for fill as they were shooting outdoors.
Thanks to the bad weather they shot indoors and well, every horror that could have happened did. Serious chroma banding from all the gain they had dialed into the camera. The fluro lights were flickering , all manner of nasty artifacts crept in.
If you ever do get the chance to shoot real high speed make darn sure you get the technical stuff nailed down, lots of the right kind of lighting is critical. Either tungsten or HMI with diffused "beakers" over the lamps to wrangle arc wander. Kinos can be problematic at high speed.

Bob.

Spec-frickin-tacular, nice job, Ray!

Really professional job Ray, I enjoyed that.

A small comment. The guy looked sober and tidy rather than drunk and desperate. I wish I looked that good after a JD session!

As usual - great job, Ray :)

/Ulf

Brilliant work Ray - looks great.

Incidentally, I was less concerned about the end of the bullet's journey as the beginning - doesn't quite look like it comes from the gun.

excellent....

Great video, great editing!!! The only thing probably stopping this is the bottle effect as Farss point out, this video should win big! BUT Ray, your work is excellent! The RED did well I think. Working in 4K is a different and very demanding world, congrats on this!

Thanks again all, my self esteem need it!

As for the bullet shot and my two cents. When doing lower budget video's, which is most of what I do, there's going to be tradeoffs. I try my best to not let the concept expand beyond what I think is do-able for any given amount. Okay, well that's not exactly true, I try to make two thousand dollar vids look like their ten thousand dollar vids and ten thousand dollar vids look like their fifty thousand dollar vids BUT I still try to be reasonable within my unreasonability (thats not really a word apparently).

That said this vid wasn't as cheap as many of my others but it still could have used a lot more money. As much as some may point out the shortcomings of the FX shot I'm comfortable with it, I know what was accomplished. I saw the before and after when it looked really bad, stood out like a sore thumb, didn't look like it was part of the image and had the jaggedness and pixelization of a ten year old video game. The final product is SO much better than that. Now, is it perfect? I must concede it’s not but is it so horrible that it would jar most people out of the story? I don't think it is. There's a difference between selling something as "real" and telling a story. In that regard I think it works. For me, if me alone, what I hear you saying about “It could have been a kick in the guts” to me isn’t truly applicable because the reveal of the bottle does that before the bottle even shatters. The rest is just follow through.

I’m tempted to start making movie reference’s about movies I liked or loved that employed elements that stood out to me as not “real” but still were effective in communicating the story. Again, its storytelling, it’s suspension of disbelief. Of course I’m not trying to tell you what works for you but only why it works for me.

- Ray
Underground Planet

Very nice work, very professional!!!! I just finished filming a music video for a local artist. She is only 19 and writes her own music. here is the video.
http://vimeo.com/24300036

Very Nice!

I easily suspended my disbelief. It's nice to be a viewer and not an editor. You did it for me.

Thanks mvpvideos2007 and nice work on yours!

David, totally appreciate it.

John, you truly made my day, thank you for that.

- Ray
Underground Planet

Wow Ray, I think that's about as good as it gets bud!

Thanks Randy, glad ya dug it and thanks for the kind words Sir =)

- Ray
Underground Planet

I don't normally listen to (or watch) much country but I really enjoyed that.

How was the Red-Vegas editing experience?

kairosmatt

Thanks kairosmatt, honestly editing a 4k project with 4k files was not that much different than the usual 1080p, drag and drop, synch and edit. It was a bit more taxing with fx on and timeline playback suffered a bit but really not near as badly as I had feared it might.

- Ray
Underground Planet

As editors we're going to be the most critical viewers around. I saw the shot at NAB on the big screen where you couldn't help but be a spectator and it was totally believable. In the controlled environment of multiple viewings, yes you can see "through" it somewhat. But I agree it still plays.

Without question, fantastic work.

I'm blown away!