Mr Zux – ‘Put It Down’ music video

A new Mr Zux video here that I did a couple of weeks back. Apologies for my slowness in posting it here. The video was shot not far from where I live in a park next to Queenscliff Lagoon. It’s the park where any circus’ are held, with the big tent and all.

The video was obviously shot using multiple takes, but in this case whilst the camera was panning. For this technique I used a Bescor Motorised Pan Tilt with the panning set to 90 degrees. I didn’t have the remote control with me, so just set it to run automatically. I shot about a minute or two of Zux in each location while the camera panned.

Putting all those shots together took a while. I had one main shot which was a vocal take, and then had to match up the movement of all the other shots to that one take. This was achieved by overlaying each of those shots one at a time with that vocal take, with the opacity set to around 50%, so I could see where they lied up. Since I’d only shot most of the extra takes for a minute or so, I had to repeat them and line them up again later in the song. Since the sppeed of each wasn’t always accurate, I had to timestretch the video at certain sections, whilst always setting ‘disable resampling’ in Sony Vegas for each clip.

Once that was done, I then had to put a mask around Zux for each of those clips, and animate those masks based on the movement of the camera and his position. It took ages! It was also really tricky for some parts, most especially the second from the left and middle instances of him which would sometimes overlap. For those, I had to reduce the feather size that blurred each clip into the background behind it and animate the individual mask points a lot more precisely. Thankfully though, it was an overcast day when we shot it, so the lighting of all the clips matched up.

With all the masking completed, included the masking on the other two locked tripod shots where he’s at the table, I then rendered each of those 3 completed shots to their own track. So they were then just single clips, as if they’d been shot in camera. From there I could edit them all together just as I would any video.

Having completed the edit, you can see what plugins I used for the final edit in the screenshot of the project below. Click to view full screen.