Hyjak – ‘All I Need’ music video

Here’s a fun video I made for Hyjak, a track from his ‘The Light At The End Of The Tunnel’ album. There was a bit more work in this one than normal, due to the opening scene which had to be edited together more like a short film. For the indoor part I edited together about 3 or 4 different takes. It took a while, but I managed to make it work. And the shots of the homeless guy went really well too. The guy did a great job lip syncing to that.

They wanted it like a tv show from the US called Intervention. Considering I haven’t watched tv in years, I didn’t even know what the show was. I had a fair idea though, and decided to have a look any episodes of the show I could find on YouTube. All I could think whilst watching the show on YouTube was “woah, my footage looks a lot better than this!”. I guess shooting music videos, it’s more artistic, where as shows like that are more like something off the news.

The rest of the shoot went really well. Espa had a big part in organising the video, and we shot the wack MC part in an office at SAE where he works. The record exec was Hyjak’s dad, the MC was a friend, Hyjak’s brother had created all the gold records and other props. It was nice to be working on something like this with props and actors wearing costumes.

Following on from there we did the cemetery scene with Espa as the priest, and then the hippy scene that Hyjak’s girlfriend had helped organise too. That went really well, and then lastly there was a hip hop night happening at this place somewhere in Enmore or Marrickville, and I managed to grab a bunch of shots of Hyjak there with a few other well known people in the Sydney making an appearance with him there.

The rest of the edit went smoothly. I found a great shot of the guys still in costume walking down this laneway that I put in slow motion. It was a bit of a fluke finding that and making it work with the lyrics.

For the colour grading, I’d used an aqua tint for the sky in the opening shot, as the sky was a bit overblown, and I wanted some colour there. I had to shoot it like that though, he went from a bright sunny position into a darker spot where he was opening the door. So as well as using that tint in the sky, I also automated the levels, making the darker part brighter the closer he got to the door.

With the office scene, I added a bit of soft diffusion to give it a kind of fake look, like the wack MC in that shot. And then masked his mouth and used a glint effect on the masked area to make the fake gold teeth sparkle. But overall, it came out really nice.

Below I’ve included 4 before and after shots, so you can see how much difference the colour made to the original footage.

And lastly, below is a screenshot of the Vegas project. Along the top left you can see the plugin chain I used for the hippy shots. I had those parts all on track 4, the normal parts on track 5, and the wack MC sequence on track 6.