Hyjak & Rates – ‘Suicide’ music video

A music video here that I shot for Hyjak and Rates last weekend. I shot this video the same day the guys had recorded the vocals for the track. They recorded with Espa at SAE in Sydney. Espa had also done some of the production on the track. He took an old beat by Vice Versa, added a few new parts to it, then mixed and mastered it also.

The video didn’t take too long to shoot, although as the sun was going down around the time we shot it, I made sure I got all the shots I needed as quick as I could. At least before the sun disappeared. It was all shot around Hyjak’s friend’s house.

For this clip, I shot it using my Mitakon LensTurbo adapter for the Sony NEX5N. That basically gives the camera a full frame look, like a Canon 5D or Nikon D800, but with the bonus on the NEX5N of 50fps at full 1080P. I won’t go into details about the LensTurbo here, but you can look it up on Google if you’re interested. And it worked really well too. I also used a cheap eBay variable ND filter for the earlier shots I took to enable more background blur at slower shutter speeds (1/100 or 1/50), and only used my Nikon f1.4 50mm lens. For most of the video it was set to f2.0, which is probably closer to f1.4 or f1.8 with the LensTurbo.

With the edit, by the end, I found that I could improve the chorus parts by using alternate takes from another chorus or both that hadn’t been used in those other chorus sections. For example, the 3rd chorus I think, I couldn’t find a good take to start it, so I grabbed a section from another chorus which was better than what I had, but hadn’t been used as the main take on its own chorus. And doing all this properly meant editing to a beats and bars grid where you can easily grab a section and copy it to somewhere else, knowing that it will still line up perfectly.

Below are a few before and after photos of the colour grade I did. This was basically levels on the video files (via media fx), a Sony Color Corrector plugin, Neat Video, and the Boris BCC7 film grain plugin. The latter I use on pretty much everything these days, as it provides a nice grain, but doesn’t look fake or over powering.

And lastly, here’s a screen shot of the project.

Overall I think it turned out nice. Really happy with the LensTurbo. The full frame look is not far off the look I used to get using the same old Nikon lenses on my old SG Pro and Canon HV20 rig.