Traverse City, MI Music Video – “Forget Me Not” by Jetty Rae

This weekend Liz, Jason, Sara, Jetty Rae, and lots of volunteers and I set out to make a music video–actually, technically we shot video for two! 90% of our time was spent shooting for Jetty Rae‘s “Forget me not” music video, while the rest of the time we spent shooting some footage for a film + music video for Sara’s movie “Bad Apples”. The first night we were at Dorothy Jean in downtown Traverse City from 7PM Saturday to 5AM Sunday. We were back at it again at 10AM Sunday at the Traverse City Opera House, made our way to Traverse City Commons, Wilson’s Antiques and called it quits around 7PM after finishing up at the Traverse City State Theatre. It was a great experience and a WHOLE lot of fun being able to work with such amazing and talented people. I’m looking forward to seeing the finished product!

Shout Outs!

1. A huge thanks to my parents for making and supplying the team with food and beverages.
2. The stores mentioned above for allowing us to use their stores.
3. Warren for making the track & cart system and the ring light.
4. Andy Wakeman Photography for lending us his video equipment.

Technical Comments:

1. Everything was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II at 24fps.
2. I was originally going to use a Canon XF305 on loan from Canon because of the auto focus, but found that the 5D Mark II produced FAR superior video quality. I couldn’t believe how “noisy” the image was that came from the XF305! Goes to show that bigger is not always better.
3. The 5D Mark II does not support viewing of LiveView and output to an external display which made setting up shots a little difficult, but we worked around it. We shot the video, then reviewed it using a HDMI to Mini HDMI cable hooked up to an on-site 24″ monitor.
4. It was a little hard to manually focus during the actions scenes but I caught on after a little practice.
5. I was surprised how much quicker the batteries drained while shooting video versus still photography. I would say that we went through 3-4 batteries the first night of shooting (about 10 hours).
6. 19 hours of total shooting with a total of 65GB of RAW footage. It’s hard to believe that amount of footage we captured for what will turn out to be about 5 minutes of video!
7. We were prepared to use hot lights for the indoor shots, but to our surprise the available and ambient light worked out great largely thanks to the use of the 5D Mark II and not the XF305!
8. Using a steadycam is a lot hard then it looks, that’s all I have to say about that.

The images below were taken as test frames.