OR△CLE - “Spring”.
After filming the Still Forms music video with Penny Halcyon, we were looking to collaborate on something the had the total opposite limitations of that project. For that, everything had to be lit a very particular way, filmed a very particular way, and Penny had to move in a very particular way, and every movement had to be planned very carefully all to make the effect work. Instead we wanted to try something very improvisational, both for Penny's dancing and my cinematography.
We started searching for a good song, and Penny came across an artist called OR△CLE, who makes beats in Denton, TX. It had perfect mellow pulsing vibes that varied throughout the song. Our original plan was for Penny to dance with smoke bombs, and I would move around her while filming with a small handheld gimbal camera called a DJI Osmo.
We did a quick test the day before we planned to shoot. So we could both get a better feel for how she could dance with the smoke bombs, the logisitics of filming with smoke bombs, and just iron out all the other little details. Things were going great, until one of them malfunctioned. It must have been packed wrong, because if you look closely at the orange smoke bomb in the video below, it's putting out an insane amount of smoke right before it explodes in Penny's hand.
Luckily Penny was alright. She had a slight burn on her hand, but was more scared than anything else. I said we weren't going to shoot anything more until I figured out a way to make it safe for her. That evening I went to the hardware store and bought some PVC pipe. I cut it to the size of the smoke bombs, threw on some end caps, and drilled a hole on one side for the fuse to go through and smoke to come out of. I tested them out myself, and it worked a lot better because the PVC pipe didn't heat up, so you didn't have to hold them on the ends like Penny had been.
We wanting to film inside of a giant abandoned Wal-Mart in Garland that I had recently learned how to sneak inside of. But as we got ready to leave I realized these new smoke bomb containers look suspiciously similar to pipe bombs, and I really didn't want to get caught trespassing with what looks like a bomb. So we decided to instead try filming on an abandoned stretch of road on the edge of Denton County that I'd stumbled upon a few days before.
Unfortunately as soon as we got out of the car at the location it started to rain heavily. The camera I had rented was due back the next day, and I couldn't figure out what to do. Penny said "I'm down to film in the rain if you are." And with that we hopped out into the middle of the storm and started filming. It was raining to hard to even light the smoke bombs, so we had to abandon that idea entirely, but the rain added such a dramatic mood, it worked anyways.
Our biggest problem though was that we only had a small bluetooth speaker to play the song on, and it was raining so loud that if I got more than 6 feet from Penny she could no longer here the song over the sound of the rain and just had to keep dancing to the tempo in her head. We got tons of great footage, but when it came time to edit, this became a huge problem. I could sync all the clips, but eventually in every shot her dancing would drift in and out of sync. I spent months playing with the footage, trying to use time remapping to get the footage back on track, but this created a problem with the frame rate looking weird, and me never being 100% certain if the dancing was still on beat. I tried cutting the clips up into little movements and just syncing small individual clips to the music, but it didn't have a very cohesive feel. After a year of playing with the footage, I finally threw in the towel and asked for help. I made the footage publicly available and asked editors to take a stab at making it work.
A friend from UNT, Eddie Chalupa, was one of the first to send me a cut, and he did a phenomenal job. He made the whole video a picture-in-picture of a mirrored and looped clip, to help the whole video have a more cohesive feel. He jumped between using full clips and out of sync sections to give it a more dynamic feel, and he threw in the odd effect here and there to add some flair. I was blown away by what he was able to do. After a frustrating evening of trying to get his edit from Final Cut to Adobe Premiere so I could color grade it, the music video was finally finished over a year after filming.
