Take Me Back |The Rise

Intro

Spring 2019 me and Kevin Saffar sat down collaborate on a music video.

This is the story of how that went down, how 1 video turned into 2, and how we ended up in (and almost won) the Musicbed challenge.

Concept

The initial idea was to make a video consisting of performance shots of the artist intercut with B-roll and story.

Using a black and white palette, silhouettes and lighting that changed and moved throughout the video - we wanted to create a world that surrounded him in darkness.

(Check out the original treatment here)

Shooting

The day before we started shooting we lost our location. Since we already picked up our gear, and with no time to find a new one, we had to improvise and make the best out of the situation..

So we rigged up a green screen in my living room and filmed there.

Shooting in such a confined space meant that our previous shot list was now unusable. Instead of bigger wide shots we were now forced to rely more on mediums and close ups. The few wide shots in the video were shot as lock-offs and then later set extended in post using VFX.

We had scouted our second location a few weeks prior, but when we got there to shoot the place had changed dramatically..

Most of the facades and exteriors were now covered in white plastic and/or fenced off due to construction - ruining most of our shots and making it very difficult to find usable angles. The ground was also covered in snow, leaving the pond where we’re hoping to shoot completely frozen and unusable.

We got a few good shots, but none of these made it into the film.

Re-shoots

Since our 2 days of shooting didn’t go very well, we knew we had to do some pick-ups.

Deciding to re-shoot also gave us the opportunity to make some changes to the story: Focusing the narrative more towards his past relationships, adding Angela Zelensky and giving it some visual contrast by having some bright sunlit shots juxtaposed the dark and gloomy.

Musicbed Challenge

A few weeks into editing we discovered the Musicbed challenge - A filmmaking competition where you have to create a music video or short film featuring music from the Musicbed library.

So we decided to reuse the footage we already shot for Take Me Back and enter the competition.

Post

A week before the deadline I sent out the latest cut for some feedback. The notes we got were super valuable but also made the last couple of days somewhat hectic..

We decided to tighten up the edit - focusing on using fire as our visual motif and restructure certain parts to make it more concise.

Since footage was a bit scares this left our timeline with a lot of gaps that now somehow had to be re-created.

To fill in the voids quick VFX slap comps were made inside Premiere. If the quick tests seemed plausible they would get marked as a shot for later completion.

In the end, the locked edit had 62 VFX shots, and the deadline was only 4 days away..

Visual Effects

After the edit was locked all the shots were given a rating and an estimated time frame. Prioritizing them by how much each shot would contribute to the story and how much value they would give to the final video.

Easy (<30 min). Rig removal, minor paint fixing.

Medium (1-3 hrs). Simple set extensions, atmospherics, rain, droplets, projector effects, minor roto.

Hard (5-8 hrs). Full BG replacement, DMP, fire fx, intensive lookdev or full character roto.

Compositing continued all the way up to an hour before the deadline - when final grade and exporting took priority. The last 2 completed shots: The polaroid on fire and the POV shot looking at the house were created in 10 and 30 min each.

Runner up

It was a crazy push, but somehow the film was completed and uploaded just a few minutes before the deadline.

Out of more than 700 submissions, the jury voted our video among the finalists. I’m super happy and grateful for being one of the runners-up in such a well-known competition, so a huge thanks to everyone involved making this project happen.

The final video for Saffar was also influenced by the Musicbed challenge. But in an attempt to cut around and hide all the syncing issues: Take Me Back ended up being a lot more fast paced and flashy compared to The Rise.