This may be the most beautiful version of the "Hallelujah" that you've ever heard.
A mutual friend came up with the wacky idea to introduce me to Puddles the Clown (he of the infamous "Puddles Pity Party" with the amazing cover of Lordes' "Royals" that has hit 16 million views on Youtube). Puddles was scheduled to do a show at the historic Regency Lodge ballroom in San Francisco and he asked me to make something special for him.
After thinking about it for awhile I hit on the idea that nobody had ever seen him without his makeup, and if I created a vignette that contrasted his singing an amazing song (Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah") with his preparing for the song, we might capture a unique quality that was really beautiful.
So that's what we did, but in order to shoot the performance part I needed to use five cameras, and with no budget they had to be my collection of cameras at the time, a Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera, Panasonic GH4 (and GX7) and the Sony A7s, plus a borrowed GH4 from my friend Mark . Each has its own strengths (and weaknesses) but they all have different sensors and ways of capturing color.
Warning! Super geeky filmmaking tech talk ahead.
The big question for me was how to match these four different sensors so that the final piece would have strong visual continuity. I had recently read a great article by Michael Garber about using the DSC Labs One Shot color chart with the Davinci Resolve grading software that was already my favorite color finishing tool (the most amazing piece of software in the world of filmmaking, and the free version does nearly everything the for-pay version does). In the article, Michael describes how to bring each camera’s footage into Resolve version 11 and apply their new “color match” control to the DSC Labs target. This is what that looks like in the Resolve UI:.
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Once matched, with a right-click you can save the color LookUp Table (LUT) and then, using the $29 Final Cut Pro X LUT Utility from Color Grading Central, those LUTs can be applied to the video clip in FCPX. I did this with each of the five cameras we used on the shoot and voila… my multicam clip had five matched cameras even before I started editing! This allowed me to edit the piece with good visual continuity well before I started the final color grading process. Here’s what the multicam clip looks like in FCPX:.
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Editing among five cameras along with b-roll from the dressing room preparations for the show was easy and straightforward. All of the b-roll was cut into the timeline as connected clips..
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Once I was completely satisfied with the edit, I deleted the LUTs from the five master clips and then used the Overwrite to Primary Storyline function to put the entire show into one storyline before exporting it as an fcpxml file for Davinci Resolve. This provided the cleanest way of getting a single timeline into Resolve..
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I then reapplied the LUTs to the clips in Resolve and added secondary qualifiers to tweak various aspects of Puddles’ makeup, along with animated custom vignettes to direct the viewers’ eye to exactly where in the frame I wanted them to be looking. The color grading process in Resolve is incredibly fun and creative and I always look forward to getting to this stage. (I still can’t believe that Black Magic Design gives this software away for free.) I consider Resolve to essentially be Photoshop for video and would never finish a project without it.
One of my favorite Resolve features is the ability to animate any aspect of the grading process, but most importantly it also provides the ability to grade clips in context with any other set of clips simultaneously, allowing for the type of visual continuity that defines a professionally-finished production..
Shooting a nearly 7' tall clown was tough for me (only 5'7")...
I had to shoot him sitting down a lot. :)
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Steemians... Thank you for watching and I hope you enjoy the final piece. I had a terrific time shooting, editing and grading it this film. Over 1.3 million people have watched it on Youtube, and their comments have been absolutely fascinating (which is always satisfying).
You can find my verification post here. 