I know you probably heard me before saying that we are going to make weekly blog posts regarding what we do and every time we didn't. Well, it's not that we don't want to...or I don't want that, but we always find something "more important" to fill our time with. Sometimes it's work, other times it's family (this doesn't actually counts, because family is first no matter what) and we managed somehow not to post for huge periods of time.
The thing is, how are we seen by others on the internet reflects on us and this blog, it's not quite what we wanted when we launched our website. This time, I am not going to say that we will write a new blog post every week, or twice a week, or whatever, we are just going to write them and release them online whenever we are doing something interesting. Oh...and believe me when I say interesting I mean it.
From now on, things are going to be different.
*by the way, if you guys have any suggestions, feel free to comment or write us an email.
That being said, I will share with some behind the scene stories about our latest music video production.
We are not a BIG production company, actually we are quite a small one, but some of the things that characterizes our team is passion, hard work and dedication. In other words, we put everything we got in a project.
Here is how everything happened. Rootkey came to our offices quite decided that he wants to make a music video at Hola Media after he took a journey on the internet looking for what we did, he almost made a study regarding our company and basically we were the production company that he was looking for.
First meeting was a relatively short. About 2 hours, discussing terms and having some wide discussions about the whole concept. Shortly after, we started pre-production and settle the production budget. When you look at the cast and crew you notice that we had quite a few people around. Well, where there are people involved, you have to be prepared for everything. Also, many characters means higher costs for our client, so we tried to fit within the budget that we've discussed initially. After the two day casting for our characters we almost had all the actors that we needed, minus some key characters, so we ended up with another two days of phone calls until we got them all.
Yep! The key word for location scouting is "adventure", even though we had most urban scouting for interiors, it doesn't mean that things would go easy on us. We didn't have a budget for building sets, so we had to rent almost every location. We went for Airbnb instead of asking friends, but I will get back to you on this because I wan't to share with you guys an interesting (it was not so great then) story from production day #2 in the next blog post.
Going further, for a couple of scenes we used Airbnb, we had access to an amazing steampunk bistro (Joben Bistro), a "home coffee" place called Meron a meat cutting factory (Carmangeria Moldovan), two hotel apartments (Castelul printul vanator and Haller Castle), one dental clinic (Novodent) and three outdoor locations, one for the dancer (with many graffiti), one forest and one for the old man in the wheelchair.
For this last location we needed a lake with a wooden dock. After we browsed Google maps we decided make a short trip near Cluj Napoca at Martinesti to see if the location was any good for us.
We found an amazing frozen lake with the perfect wooden dock. Cadrage is the app that we are using when doing scouting and work like a charm. You can find it on App Store and Google Play for ~ 13$
As a conclusion, we settled all actors and locations in 8 days. (in parallel with that we made our shot list, moods, equipment lists, everything we needed to fix in pre-production). When I say settled, I mean contracts and agreements signed and I advise you to do the same in your future production to avoid unwanted surprises.
After a week of meetings, scouting, preparing...we were eager to start shooting this video.
On average, we were shooting 2-3 hours in every location, plus travel times and gear preparation.
We started with the cafe scene early in the morning. 06.30 was the meeting time at the office with the crew because we needed to start shooting at 08.00. When shooting in a location that's also a business, like Meron (they make amazing coffee products...if you end up in Cluj Napoca you might want to stop here for at least a cup of coffee) even if you got the place for a few hours or a day, take in consideration what that means for them in terms of sales. I recommend you to try and make your shots work as well as you can. The guys at Meron were awesome!
We ended up using almost all the coffee shop, but we had fun and made our time there worth something. We had 4 shots here and made them in about 2 hours with mounting and dismounting equipment included.
Next location was the dental clinic, that we decided to shoot later in the evening at 17.00. We had all day for relaxing, getting ourselves ready for the scene. We decided to wait until after the sundown because it was way easier for us to control the light at the location (pretty big windows). Pretty straightforward, about two hours later we were wrapping our first day of shoot.
Here's what we used for this shots:
Blackmagic Ursa mini 4.6K, with Zeiss CP.2 lenses - mainly 28 mm (I'm actually in love with this lens), one heavy duty tripod, a led kit with 3 600 led lights (I think they are 600), bunch of cables, gaffer tape and a DIY dolly.
Oh! We have also a Behind the Scene video for our day 1!
Rootkey feat. Hubert Tubbs - Factory Puppets Making of/behind the scenes #Day 1 from Hola Media on Vimeo.
And the official music video
Enjoy!