What Makes Music Videos Rock?

How Directors, DPs, Colorists and Post Houses Nurture Creativity as Budgets Spiral Downward

The music video industry thrives on beats, sex appeal , and shockingly vivid imagery. Long-standing careers in rock and roll have been built on a savvy opening salvo of MTV content, and established artists look to muusic video creatives to help devise visuals that define generations of youth culture. So working on these clips gives you street cred, keeps you young, and provides killer clips for your demo reel. Is there a cooler job to be found anywhere in the world?

Well, there have been better times to be in music videos. Budgets have lately headed downhill, as the ongoing industry-wide recession drains record company coffers. That makes it difficult, helmers say, to continue making videos that depict an artist in the best possible light. In other words, Beyoncé isn’t getting any less sexy, but her videos are getting less expensive.

"Two or three years ago, music videos were very lucrative," recalls Craig Fanning, the impresario behind FM Rocks, home to top-shelf director Bryan Barber (OutKast, Missy Elliott) and Jake Nava ( Beyonce, Kelis), among others. "But when the downloading really started hitting and everybody started realizing how bad it was, everyone went into shell-shock mode." Here’s how bad it’s gotten: three or four years ago, Fanning says, a top director would get three videos a month with budgets north of $750,000. Today, a hot director is lucky to see that many big-budget spots in an entire year. Outside the high end, the picture may be even more grim. Directors Film & Video interviewed for this story estimate that today’s budgets are anywhere from one-half to one-third, or even less, what they were just a few years ago.

If labels run the risk of devaluing their most important properties— their artists— by cheaping out on video budgets, top-shelf music video directors, DPs, FX artists and colorists are learning to make do with what’s available to them. From veterans like Jake Nava, who kick-started Beyoncé’s solo career with a trio of clips that drew on European fashion photography to redefine American glam, to newcomers like Patrick Daughters, who deployed antique Panavision lenses to show the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs in a whole new light, the current generation is working overtime to feed the twin masters of commerce and creativity. Here’s a look at some premier innovators in the field, who tell us how they keep the music (television) playing.

Jake Nava, Director

Recent Credits: Beyoncé featuring Jay-Z "Crazy in Love"; Kelis, "Milkshake"; Kylie Minogue, "Red Blooded Woman"

On editing: The editing process is the time when we become most musical. We’re obviously working on an Avid, which is very similar to Pro Tools, and we are able to time our shots and time our edits perfectly to the music and use certain shots and certain images to reflect particular musical themes. We can assign a visual theme to a musical theme and in that way get closer to bringing the music to life. If the track is quite frenetic and funky, chances are the images will be and the editing will be as well. Sometimes it’s important to leave a shot long enough for people to see it clearly. Hopefully the quality of the shots is high enough that you’re not trying to obscure it in flashy editing technique.

On lipstick: It’s a question of trying to infuse the image with soul by focusing on every detail. I really do have 20-minute conversations with the make-up artist about how to do the lipstick. Some filmmakers may find that nauseatingly superficial and boring, but I reckon it’s really important what your lead character’s lips look like, whether they’re a singer or a film star. If anything from art department to styling to make-up to hair and choreography is lacking, it’s going to look bad, and you’ve only got yourself to blame.

The line between sexy and smutty: Kelis manages to really throw it in your face and yet not seem cheap. That’s a fine line. "Milkshake" was a remake of a Paul Hunter video, and Paul Hunter is a brilliant director whose work is more consistent in style and quite polished. But Kelis didn’t like that video. I think she wanted a video that had a little bit of rawness to it. It became clear to me that, like her dress sense, this video was an opportunity to not be like everyone else. So: low contrast, high grain, lots of smoke. Those three things alone are totally out of season in American music video. And yet I put them all into the Kelis video and everyone really likes it.

Getting grainy: We did end up shooting "Milkshake" on 35, after I had been telling people we should shoot on 16 because it would be more grainy. We were looking to make it really grainy. My quote in the telecine session for that video was "more milky," meaning more low-contrast. The graders tell me they call it a "print look," meaning you’re emulating the kind of look you would look for if you were going to project the picture, which in general is a slightly more sensitive, low-contrast, more photographic approach. I wouldn’t say I’m trying to get a print look, but I’m trying to get a look that I like that doesn’t look like other things.

" If anything from art department to styling to make-up to hair and choreography is lacking, it’s going to look bad, and you’ve only got yourself to blame."

On budgets: I really genuinely wish the budgets were twice what they are, because no matter what level you work at, you get frustrated by having doors shut in your face. There are doors that are not open when you’re working on $500,000 as opposed to $1,000,000. It’s a bit ridiculous that anyone should spend that much money, but it’s really true. Beyoncé was frustrated on the last job by how little time we had to film each scene, and you don’t want frustrated artists. It’s not necessarily that you need a bigger set or you need more extras. It might be prep time, or sometimes the size of your lighting package. But the place where you feel it the most is shooting time.

On Steadicam: I’m a great fan of the Steadicam, especially for dancing. Christopher Doyle, who shot Chungking Express, said that before he shoots anything, he drinks a bottle of whiskey and dances with the characters. I’d say the Steadicam allows you to dance with the action, whether it’s real dancing or just the blocking of an action scene. You can be responsive to what you’re seeing in a way that you can’t be with a dolly and tracks. If it’s Beyoncé doing some amazing bit of dancing that’s really sassy and entertaining, you want to capture it, make sure you can see it. You want to move with it and make people feel part of it.

Feature film ambitions: As I read scripts, I’m still working out whether I’m going to end up making a feature film that, in its wildest dreams, will become either a) a blockbuster or b) cult. My favorite films are Quadrophenia, La Haine, City of God, The Warriors, and The Long Good Friday. Those are the kinds of things that I’d like to see, the kinds of references I’d like to be relevant to my first script, as opposed to mainstream urban movies. Films like Bulletproof Monk and Torque don’t do much for me personally. But when I saw City of God it made me excited to even be in a business where I pick up film cameras. That was a film that had something really important to say, said it in a new way and it moved me. Memento moved me recently. Mind you, I quite like Pirates of the Caribbean as well. I just think that with music video you make a music video and you work on it all-in for a month or whatever, but you make a movie and you’re working on it for two years of your life. You need to live with that work and be really proud of it in a long-term sense.

Sophie Muller, Director

Recent Credits: Nelly Furtado, "Try"; The Distillers, "The Hunger"; No Doubt, "Underneath it All"; Dolly Parton, "I’m Gone"

On the artist as inspiration: I love music, but most of my ideas come from the artist rather than the song. I don’t hear the lyrics until about the sixth listen. If you hear, "I walked along the beach," you don’t want to see someone walking along the beach. That’s the worst.

On getting work: I’ve never written a treatment and gotten a job. If [the agency] says, "We’d like you to make the video, here’s the artist, talk to them," then it seems to work. But [not sending in treatments] is probably why I didn’t work for years. Each person is too individual— I try to be open-minded and not have presumptions about people, to get them to say how they think they will be most comfortable. Sometimes it doesn’t work— I talk to an artist, there’s no chemistry, I don’t get any ideas, and I think "uh-oh." But usually I can tell immediately through a phone call whether I’m going to be creative or not.

On process: I remember the first time I did a storyboard— by the time I got to the fourth board, I just went, "Oh, I don’t want to do this." I like being spontaneous. If you’re too specific about scripts, you’re tied down to what you’ve come up with, and I find that boring. I leave myself room to try new things. Luckily, I usually pull it off.

On technique: I probably drive my DPs mad because I’m always telling them where to put the lights. I only like to light from the front, so that people’s faces are well-lit. I don’t like side lighting. I want to be able to see expressions. My happiest area is in the experimental field. I went to film school. I was given two rolls of film for a year. You have to make every frame last. Even now, I’m kind of like, "Turn the camera off!"

On effects: I’m not that interested or good at highly technicalized things— I’m very, sort of, female in that way— I haven’t got a clue about special effects. When I’ve tried it, it’s been a disaster. I get bored when I watch effects-driven videos, though, because I miss the central, core performance. How much FX can you watch? It’s just not my cup of tea.

On her newest technique: In the Nelly Furtado video " Try," it’s archive footage and film we shot projected, rather than actual built sets. I went through a period using back projection. When Hitchcock had people traveling in a car, he’d use back projection for outside the car. It’s cheap and it’s beautiful. The reason Hitchcock did it was to make people look good, so that the actor wouldn’t be outside with a red nose. He’d have the actor looking amazing and immaculate. So there’s a combination of glamour and telling the story. There’s so many different ways to use an image behind a person that I’ve just started. It’s a fantastic way of doing whatever you like in the confines of a studio.

On budgets: The last video I made was with [ artist ] Mindy Smith. [Because of the budget] I knew the idea couldn’t have art direction, couldn’t have extras, and we just did it with simple atmospheric lighting, and a location. It’s a video I’m really proud of. There’s a lot you can do with a light, a person and a camera. It’s very easy to make an amazing video for $800,000— you can create a huge magic world. But if you have nothing, then you’ve got to say, "All right, we’ll put the light there, and I’ll move the lights here, and wear this color T-shirt rather than that one against this color wall..."— you’re constantly testing yourself. It’s a very simple thing, music, and so videos sometimes don’t need to be as extravagant as they are.

"You can make people hear things in a song that they wouldn’t necessarily hear by the way you edit."

On who she admires: Whenever I see a Mark Romanek video, I sort of want to kill myself— everything he does is brilliant. I saw his new Jay-Z video [ "99 Problems" ], and my mouth literally fell open. Ninety-nine percent of videos are rubbish. They’re formulaic. You need a bit of sex, some nice clothes, and it has to be well shot. But then you see one of his videos, and you say, "Oh my God, that’s what you can do with a video!"

On editing: I always edit my own work. I edit on an Avid. Obviously a lot of directors sit with an editor and basically edit their video, but they don’t actually use the technology. I find that too frustrating. I was always thinking, "Oh, one frame this way!" In the end, I just pushed them aside and taught myself how to edit. You can make people hear things in a song that they wouldn’t necessarily hear by the way you edit.

Dave Meyers, Director

Recent Credits: N.E.R.D., "She Wants To Move"; Jay-Z "Dirt Off Your Shoulder"; Ludacris, "Stand Up"; Missy Elliott, "Pass That Dutch"

On inspiration: I adapt the soul of the song to things I’m interested in and going through in my life, and, when possible, I try to get in touch with the artist and hear what they’re going through in their life. The next layer is looking at where the artist should go. Some artists that are fabulous might need to do something real and honest. Others that have always been honest, might need to do something fabulous. I endlessly sit at my computer and try out different ideas. I’m inspired by all forms of media. Pictures, movies, my own experiences in life. I just create a mishmash of my vision and then I articulate it into a treatment.

"Movies are so high-falutin, but we’re all more trained in post capacities."

On budgets: Smaller budgets have absolutely been a reality. But the vanity hasn’t gone down. I’m still paying top-dollar for the glam squads. I’ve payed $100,000 to 200,000 for the glam squad and then had a $300,000 production budget. The budgets haven’t gotten to a point where I can’t exercise a vision at all. I’ve found that with the trust factor of my name and my sense of articulation, I can shoot half as much film as I used to. I only shoot one or two takes and the little bit of the song that I want. Some artists just don’t move fast, so I can’t apply that strategy. In that case the budget crunch becomes very difficult, but usually with those artists, their budgets are a lot higher. They might have come from a million to $700,000 whereas most others come from $600,000 down to $300,000. A-list artists doing $150,000 videos— that’s a readjustment. I think Ludacris’ last video was $70,000. And it was good. I love this time. It’s a great time to shake out the nonsense. It allows for new opportunity and new voices, and allows for the old voices to be reinvigorated with new challenges. Everybody’s adapting and it makes for a really interesting time.

On Post: I love post. I like working with the creatives at the visual houses, where they get the same thrill I get out of creating fantastical places and funny gags and manipulating reality. I’m a Star Wars kid. I’ve been one of the first ones in the theater when any sort of effects extravaganza comes out. Because some directors shy away from effects, it’s been a place where I’ve found individuality and a specific stamp within videos. It’s my playground. If I want to pull someone’s head off, I just figure it out and then convince the artist. I’ve built up a resume where the effects have looked good, so artists trust me when I want to do something in CG. It actually makes you more informed than a lot of movie directors who never get the chance to play around with effects. It’s a funny thing. Movies are so highfalutin, but we’re all more trained in post capacities.

On happy mistakes: Videos are very forgiving. When you make a mistake, sometimes you can just not tell anybody and they might embrace it as something great. If you make a bad mistake, as long as your artist looks good people might not even register it as a bad video. I’ve always felt that music videos are like a paid film school. It gets you ready for the world.

On editing: My editor is my college freshman roommate, Chris David. I stuffed him into the editing position when we got out of college, so he learned his craft as I learned mine. I keep him so busy that he’s probably worked with one other director in eight years. We’re creatively in sync, we complete each other’s sentences, and we have the familiarity and friendship that goes back to college. I haven’t had the need to be obsessive in the edit because he’s so strong.

On who he admires: The most consistent names that come to mind are Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg. They continually intrigue me and excite me on all levels. Spike Lee played a big part in my life when he was doing Do The Right Thing and Crooklyn. I read all his books and learned filmmaking and some of the politics. Within videos, everyone has hit or misses, but the only video director that has consistently been interesting to me is Mark Romanek.

What’s exciting: What I’m most excited about nowadays is Radical Music, a satellite to Radical Media. I’m trying to create a director-friendly company that’s not so driven by greed and money and more championed by creative talent. I’m on the phone daily, making suggestions on how we can better the environment so that young directors can grow. One of our breakout videos was Chris Milk’s "All Falls Down" by Kanye West. Now Chris is getting all sort of tracks sent to him from all the right artists. I feel proud that there was a creative guy that wasn’t getting jobs, and we put the right support structure around him and now he’s off in Australia shooting a Jet video. It’s great.

Patrick Daughters, Director

Recent Credits: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Maps" and "Date With the Night"; The Rapture, "Love Is All"; The Secret Machines, "Nowhere Again"

The right connections: While I was in school, I made a few good friends, and one of them ended up forming a band. We had always talked about my doing a music video for her band, and when that finally came to fruition it ended up being the [Yeah Yeah Yeahs’] "Maps" video.

Low-tech effects: I bought this Bolex camera on eBay, and the pin that holds the film flush [in the gate] comes loose. I think I figured out how to make it come loose. That’s how you get the effect [from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ "Date With the Night" ]. It provided us, in editing, with an easier way to structure the images against the structure of the song.

A treatment for "Maps": The only way I knew how to describe the idea for "Maps" was to describe the angles from shot to shot and what I intended to effect through certain camera moves. It was very precise, but the hard concept, the kernel of the idea, is not something you can reduce. It’s just footage of them playing, but it’s a bit of a video-in-a-video, and it’s also a moving performance. Above all, it was just treated as though it were a scene from a film. In the end it panders a little bit to the emotional quality of the song, during the driving part where you have the shutter effect happening. But it was intended to feel a bit more restrained, a bit less of a sale. The one thing I was watching a lot right before we did "Maps" was [ Jean-Luc ] Godard’s A Woman is a Woman. You can see the reference quite pointedly when the color changes, actually. That was the genesis of the idea.

The right equipment: We used 30-year-old Panavision lenses for Maps." There’s something about them. The newer lenses tend to be a lot more crisp. We shot anamorphic 35mm because we wanted to get those very dramatic and romantic flares. When you blast light into the lens, the image gets ghosted with whatever color the light is, so you see that very clearly in certain moments. Also, there’s a ton of drag horizontally using those lenses, and the image has this tooth that’s not a hyper-glossy quality. I attribute all of that to my DP, Sean Kim, who did an amazing job. He always does. We discuss everything in great detail beforehand. He suggested using those lenses and described to me very accurately what they would do and how they would render certain light flares. Getting the effects in camera is definitely my preference. I don’t really like post flares, although when it comes down to it it’s hard to tell the difference.

"We shot anamorphic 35mm because we wanted to get those very dramatic and romantic flares."

On inspiration: The end sequence from The Secret Machines’ "Nowhere Again" was actually inspired by an artist named Pierre Huyghe, who won the Hugo Boss prize a couple of years ago. He has this amazing installation piece about two modern monolithic apartment buildings in the suburbs of Paris talking to each other. If we’d had a lot more money, we would have shown it from considerably more dramatic angles. We wanted to do a helicopter shot that tracked down the length of the city avenue, and you saw the whole city start to come alive. But obviously that’s a different scale.

Other people’s videos: I liked the last couple of videos that Michel Gondry did. I liked that Gary Jules video [ "Mad World" ] a lot, and then the Steriogram video [ "Walkie Talkie Man" ] I thought was really good. Mark Romanek is a really quality technician. His work always looks amazing and the cutting’s really nice. It’s really well-paced. Some of the things he’s done I haven’t liked as much, but the Johnny Cash video [ "Hurt" ] might be the best video I’ve ever seen. It’s rare to be moved by a commercial for a song, but, my goodness, that video was so good. And the use of the archival footage was brilliant. It was perfectly executed. Everything was really in line.

On budgets: I hate to say it, but I feel like I kind of missed the golden age of the music video. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, and things obviously happen in a cyclical way, but at the present time there is a lot of lament. I hear it from people in crew and people in production and all across the board. I think it’s directly related to the music industry’s economic crisis right now. In that regard it makes sense to me. But I think people are in a state of panic, too. There’s a lot of industry consolidation going on, and it doesn’t make for the most confident environment creatively.

Brett Simon, Director

Recent Projects: Hoobastank, "The Reason"; Polarbear, "Belly"; The Killers, "Somebody Told Me"

On Editing: The editing is where my heart can be broken. It’s very intimate: just me and my laptop sharing secrets, making discoveries, drinking wine. I get possessive of the cut. I have to remind myself that this isn’t a monogamous relationship— that there’s a band, a label, and TV censors who want to fool around with my edit, and that they are entitled to do so. There is something to be said about letting go, about getting some distance from the material. I understand that and, at the same time, I cling to my director’s cuts and pretend they are the only versions out there.

"Limits are inspiring but you have to recognize them. There’s nothing worse than a low-budget video that’s all gussied up and pretending to be posh."

On experimentation: I’m a toy junkie. There’s not a place in the production or post process that doesn’t catch my interest. I play a lot. I build cameras and lenses. I like to break things. I spend too much time alone messing around with my computer, but this is where I discover a lot of my techniques for videos. I’m building up a little arsenal of techniques that I’m dying to try out. One in particular— I know it would be my best video. I just need to find the right band. I’d tell you [about it], but I already have nightmares that someone else will discover it. [ Simon collaborated with founding Jane’s Addiction bassist Eric Avery on a solo project where the whole video, called "Belly" consists of scanned images of the musician’s face.] There was a lot of trust between Eric and I. We went into production not fully knowing what we were doing. Eric had to lie perfectly still inside this cardboard box I built for him; he was very patient. We had to learn the language of the scanner as we were making the video. We figured out all of these in-camera effects. Eric made "sound waves" by tapping his fingers against the glass as the scanner light passed over him. There is no Photoshop in the whole video.

On budgets: I entered the industry after the glory days of big budgets. I was already used to doing a lot with very little. Limits are inspiring but you have to recognize them. There’s nothing worse than a low-budget video that’s all gussied up and pretending to be posh. The best low-budget videos trade in slickness for authenticity. They can’t use the expensive toys, so they build their own. Roman Coppola’s Phoenix video [ "Funky Squaredance" ] is a good example.

On who he admires: Michel Gondry keeps outdoing himself. He has a playfulness and purity of spirit that restores my sense of awe. So many directors have made careers out of holding a mirror to other bits of culture. Gondry’s work doesn’t seem to reference anything outside itself. It just is. His videos inspire me and also make me want to call it quits.

Christopher Soos, Director

Recent Credits: The Cure, "The End of the World"; Christina Aguilera, "Fighter"; Mary J. Blige, "No More Drama"; The Strokes, "Reptilia"

On the field: I always felt close to the music video genre. The commercial thing can be a wonderful experience, but it’s hard to stand out in that genre. We’re not in Europe, the creative direction has nothing to do with the Cannes advertising festival, and there’s not too many Jonathan Glazers out there with carte blanche creatives. You’re rarely involved with a campaign that’s trying to break barriers. Music videos, on the other hand, have this pretense that they’re constantly trying to push the envelope. But at the end of the day we’re all pushing product. Sometimes the bands are the clients, and sometimes the record labels— more often these days. Creative freedom is completely dependent on who’s calling the shots; in other words, who’s allowing the director to do their job?

On creative freedom: If you’re expected to be free in the adult playground of visionary brilliance, if the band, the director, the money people, and the owner of the production company are expecting you to come up with the craziest shit that blows MTV away, you feel that vibe. You and the director play, hopefully people get it, and voila! Cool visual stuff that sells product, wins awards and makes heads turn. Great! The best projects are the ones you know going in are full of creative freedom, knowing the project has the potential to be killer— wicked director, cool track, good crew, nice budget— you’re going to invest a lot of time. Whether it be tons of pre-production, plenty of days to shoot, and getting involved with post— color-correction, talking to the editor, or throwing your two cents to the FX stuff. It’s all part of the ideal music environment. The DP’s role on paper is basically a person with a light meter who shows up for the shoot. The real life is a sort of definable chaos whose answers aren’t always predictable.

"I want dripping, wet-paint celluloid. That DV thing is cool, but nothing is going to take away the emotional response I have with film."

In the colorist’s suite: On commercials I work very closely with my colorist in L.A. for dailies. On music videos, I’m never more than a back-seat driver, letting the director call the shots. Going into the session, both the director and I know what the look is. Hopefully the relationship with the colorist is a creative one, so finding the look in your head is not just a technical driving session, but an artistic mutual understanding of the project.

On the elements of style: Back in the 90s everybody worked the swing-and-tilt look to the max. Before I got sick of it, I thought I’d loosen the look up by disabling the mechanism from the confining brackets the front element is designed around, with the Arri 435 in-camera ramping and beveled glass hovering in front of the lens. It allowed me to break up the image, play with jerky in-camera speed changes as defined by musical cues, and turn straight photography into herky-jerky Jell-o lensing. It was a reaction to the norms of the time. I can’t touch those techniques today, but I’ve always been a fan of in-camera trickery. I recently shot a Cure video with Robert Smith playing a stop-motion character in some mental fantasy land. The concept called for classic stop-motion techniques, but in order to match the look with performance and other stop-motion type looks, I had to resort to camera shutter angle and frame rate and half-speed performance techniques to pull it off. Relying on post for everything is a bad idea. Know your camera. Understand the medium. Don’t rely on other people to solve all your creative problems.

On the anamorphic myth: I love anamorphic lenses. They frame landscapes like a Romantic 19th century painter. The added bonus is a must-have letterbox for TV, hooray, with characteristic low depth of field. It’s a portrait look with lots of compositional width. Close-focus anamorphic primos are easy to light and have good minimum focus characteristics, so don’t be fooled by the myth of anamorphic lensing. It’s easy.

On the passing of an era: The 90s allowed much more creative freedom all around. Young directors and DPs were asked to experiment. Everyone seemed to want something different, and it was en vogue to challenge and compete, with new DPs trying to out-do the others with crazier gizmos, lenses and in-camera stuff: learning electronics, or buying copper piping and plastic sheets to build rigs to warp the image.

On HD: I hate Star Wars HD cinema. And film stocks competing with HD by looking more and more like digital? Ouch, I hate that. I want dripping, wet-paint celluloid. The DV thing is cool, but nothing is going to take away the emotional response I have with film. I love technology and I love independence, but the two are still a distant second to my relationship with the dream, the emotion, the painterly quality of film. I love the saxophone sound. Now the digital saxophone also sounds great. That transition took a while, a good 20 years. Maybe digital in the visual medium will take the same amount of time. Let’s talk in the year 2020.

Andymac, Creative Director CreoCollective ( Santa Monica)

Company Credits: N.E.R.D., "She Wants To Move"; Jay-Z, "Dirt Off Your Shoulder"; Kings of Leon, "Molly’s Chambers"; Shania Twain, "Ka-Ching"

Visualizing the shoot: [N.E.R.D.’s] "She Wants to Move" came in really fast. We had one meeting, and they weren’t sure how many FX shots they’d need— they said maybe 60, but it ended up being, like, 160. They could only shoot so many people and they wanted this big environment, but they didn’t have the designs. So we got a couple of artists to do concept art and paint up visualizations from Dave Meyers’ very simple storyboard frames. Whatever they painted, we knew they could apply the same textures to the 3D models in the end. That really helped, because he’s a very busy man. We started previsualizing these renders and took them to him before the shoot, and he liked that. He shaped the form of how we saw it. Some things we had misinterpreted, and some things he was surprised by the scope of. "You mean we can go bigger?" So it solved some of the problems involved in [figuring out] what we were about to shoot.

Green-screen routines: The biggest problem [on this shoot] was the green screen. Quite often, when production companies are hiring materials, sometimes they do deals. Well, there are a couple of companies in town that have really bad quality blue and green screens. They’ve had mud on them and some are torn. They’re film blue screens, and they’re chroma-key screens instead of the modern digital greens. And every single green and blue that they had was a different color. When we all arrived they were already built and stretched, and they were huge, and they were all different colors. So even though we had a process screen up there, they were all so varied in their color and quality that it was going to be difficult to key. And also they started to bring out smoke machines out and flashing lights— a few things we hadn’t talked about that would raise a few flags as far as compositing goes. They were on a fast track, and they said, "Hey, we always have flashing lights and smoke. It’s a music video!" And I was like, " Yeah, I forgot. Sorry."

Staying in 2D: There would have been too many CG environments in the video to render for every camera angle, and also whenever they changed the edit, each element would have to be re-rendered. So we did a CG background. Imagine a big donut going around the camera. It was as if the camera was locked off, but the action of people dancing was continuous wherever the camera was pointing. So we rendered 100 frames looking one way, then turned the CG camera and did another 100 frames. We went all the way around, just like spokes on a wheel, and wound up with eight plates pointing in every direction. When you brought them into the Inferno, you could tile them together, and wherever you panned the camera in the composite, it would appear as if you were doing a nodal rotation. The perspective was always correct, and everywhere you looked there were interactive lights, people were dancing, and you didn’t see any seams.

"I got into supervising on set, just so I could work with jobs that had a higher production value. And the money all goes on the screen."

"FX by design": When I first got into post-production, people would come to meetings and say, "How do I do this blue-screen job?", and then they’d leave and shoot it unsupervised. They’d come back and of course it would be all wrong, because they didn’t know [any better]. And it was such a waste, spending the whole budget just fixing technical problems. So I got into supervising on set, just so I could work with jobs that had a higher production value. When you’re fixing stuff [in post], you feel like you’ve got all this power, these creative tools, and you end up just going in and taking out sandbags that were accidentally left in. It feels like such a waste. So it’s FX by design. You’re part of the production process, and you get involved and show them where you can save them money, and, from your experience, which effects will look best in the end. And the money all goes on the screen.

Dave Hussey, Colorist Company 3 ( Santa Monica)

Recent Projects: Beyonce featuring Jay-Z, "Crazy in Love"; Outkast, "Hey Ya!"; Linkin Park, "Faint"

On the evolution of telecine: I’ve been a colorist for over 20 years. t’s been fun to watch telecine evolve. At the beginning, the equipment we used was fairly mediocre. The telecines were analog. The transfers seemed noisy and the colors unnatural. DPs were never completely happy about how the look of their film translated to video. In the early 80s, some of us worked on Ranks, which had a tendency to drift as you were color-correcting if the room temperature wasn’t consistent. We had no secondary color-correction and sometimes you could work all day and the computer would fail and you could lose all your work. Now, we often work using Spirit telecines that use CCD technology. I could put up a film from a project I worked on six months previous and it would still look the same. Da Vinci has improved an amazing amount since the 80s, as well. We have an incredible amount of control over the look of the film. Since our telecine systems are so stable, now we are able to do all the color-correction first, and then an assistant can record the footage overnight [as opposed to recording and correcting simultaneously due to color drift]. This enables the colorist and clients to do the bulk of the creative work before they become tired. Directors can’t stay through a 16-hour session— now they can set the looks for the job and leave, knowing that what they want will end up accurately recorded to tape. Colorists can now do one job per day and one more during the evening, with both projects being recorded at night. We can fit more jobs in, which makes our clients happy.

"The colorist/DP relationship was adversarial. Now it is 100 percent different. DPs appreciate how much we can add to the look of the film."

On shrinking budgets: Budgets have shrunk significantly in the last couple of years, but expectations from the record companies and artists have not. Colorists have felt pressure to get the jobs completed as quickly as possible to keep projects on budget.

On HD: Most of my jobs are done in 525 resolution. MTV has not asked for hi-def masters as of yet. It’s just a matter of time before we transition to HD. More and more consumers are purchasing HD televisions and dish systems. Working in HD is much more interesting for a colorist. The look of film telecined to HD is amazing— it brings out the quality of film. On the down side it also brings out bad lighting, bad makeup, and cheap-looking sets. When you are working on a project that will be viewed in HD, you have to elevate your effort in every way. NTSC has a tendency to fuzz things out a bit and you can get away with a little more. In HD, you can’t. Beauty work will be greatly increased by HD. You can see every pore, every small defect in the skin.

On Collaboration: The colorist/director relationship is essential. Sometimes I have directors come to the session with very specific references from photographs, paintings or other films. Other times the director will say, "Let’s just play with the look of the film for a while and find something cool." In earlier years, mostly due to the equipment limitations, the colorist/DP relationship was adversarial. Now it is 100 percent different. DPs appreciate how much we can add to the look of the film. On a set that is behind schedule, they can spend a little less time lighting, knowing that we can enhance shadows or highlight an area instead of spending expensive production time to add a light. I think most DPs would acknowledge that they learn an incredible amount when they come to telecine. They can see what lighting worked and what didn’t before it has been tweaked digitally. Also, as anyone who has been to telecine will tell you, it’s a great place to decompress after a long shoot. The telecine is where the post-mortem to the shoot usually occurs. It’s the place where the director can finally chuckle over how Bob the Steadicam guy slipped and fell into the pool in the middle of the artist’s best performance or catch up on what other directors have been working on or just finally have a decent meal sitting down.

On Early Involvement: I think for any colorist it is worthwhile to visit sets every now and then. It reminds me that it’s not just another roll of film I have on the telecine. It’s the work of many talented craftsmen who have worked incredibly hard to bring the project together. I have never walked away from a set not feeling impressed by how much everyone gives and how hard they work.