Mitch Martinez – Director of Photography | Everlit music video

This blog entry shows some of the behind the scenes and making of shots for the Everlit music video, “Break Away” – featuring Daniel Sickles in the narrative. The band delivers a heavy, driving, mid-tempo hard rock song that needed a music video that fit the song well, as well as their self-producing budget. It’s definitely tough for a band to fund their own music video – so we did the best we could for them.

We were lucky enough to get some great locations for about as cheap as possible, wardrobe items from ebay and amazon, and some crew members that weren’t just in it for the paycheck. 🙂

Some of the guys in the band were members of a different band previously and taking a look at their other music videos, their goal started to take shape. They wanted something that looked solid and pro looking but still maintained an “edge”. The band performances in the other music videos either had an overly frantic or practically static approach; we decided to split the difference and not go crazy with the camera on their performance but try to keep the camera moving with a lot of dolly shots to give them the vibe that was needed. We saved the more erratic camera stuff for the narrative with Dan. All of that footage was handheld and very visceral.

The location for the narrative was an adventure to get to – third floor of a building -but with a winding route and blocked off passages and pitch black rooms to navigate all while passing gear carefully to the next person to get it to our destination. And the final destination was absolutely filthy with heavy layers of dirt, dust, and debris everywhere – in a visually beautiful way, of course. With that, we really needed to keep our gear to an absolutely minimum. We had a very small, 2-cycle generator for some LED lights, the camera gear, a small ladder, and cheap tarps to put all of our gear and wardrobe/props onto to minimize how dirty it would get that day.

Again, budget was limited – so some of the band members played the rolls of the armed guards in the narrative. We were lucky enough to have a local prop master/stunt instructor that supplied the weapons for the narrative, as well as instruction on how to hold them.

The biggest challenge were the couple of green screen shots. Due to the location environment, we weren’t really able to green screen it the right way. That definitely made post work more challenging – especially since Dan had a lot of strands of hair that wouldn’t tolerate a bad key. Luckily, the entire music video wasn’t green screen so with proper finesse, we made the green screen shots.

Towards the end of the narrative shoot day, we got shut down for about 20-30 minutes because the police were outside. Not because of anything we were doing – but because the building owner had to give a statement at the local police station about a nearby robbery – or something to that effect. We wouldn’t be able to be left inside without someone from the property being there. After a bit of friendly troubleshooting and suggested alternatives, a solution was found and we were able to wrap out the day.

Once everything was in the can, we knocked out the edit quickly and the band really liked how the whole thing turned out. It was fun to work with the band on this music video and I look forward to getting even more adventurous with their next music video. Good times!

Here’s the final video.