Taurus Scott: Beat on the Drum
in august of 2012, LA musician Taurus Scott asked me to direct and produce a music video for his upcoming album on Hellfyre Club Records.
i spent a bit of time coming up with the basic concept and sketching out the shot list, and then headed up to Taurus' toluca lake headquarters with the RED scarlet and some spray-painted ping-pong ball halves.
Taurus had employed the acting services of a few friends, and we shot the piece over the course of about 5 or 6 hours. most of the video is shot using a glidecam HD2000, which was considerably overloaded by the weight of the scarlet, even stripped down with no cage.
in the end, however, we got the shots we needed, and then it was back to DEM HQ where about 160 hours of VFX work were done to complete the video.
josh fielstra guides mr. scott through the world of 'Beat on the Drum'
i hadn't initially planned to do as much camera matchmoving and 3D work as we ended up doing, but quite a few of the shots translated really well and allowed us to get a little more creative with how we placed the effects. there's a few sketchy shots in there to be sure - we used a combination of SynthEyes and AE's built-in 3D camera tracker to achieve the best results we could depending on the shot.
vfx worksheet, tracking the status of the VFX shots for BotD
to give the 'mad hatter' character (the illustrious Josh Fielstra) colour in an otherwise (mostly) monochromatic environment, we resorted to manuallly rotoscoping him out in every shot, and colour correcting his pass in DaVinci before recompositing the shots with effects, etc. i tried to preserve the RAW workflow as much as possible until we had to bake in looks for compositing, etc. then the whole piece went through one final correction pass for final curve and colour tuning.
the surprisingly complex penultimate shot
there is a lot of love in this video. the opening sequence has morning radio chatter that is actually myself and AC / editor / vfx-artist saying some carefully written dialogue about a strange electrical storm being reported in areas of toluca lake. subtle, but it really fills out the idea. we also did all of the foley and SFX during the intro sequence.
the video premiered in march 2013.
DIRECTOR/CAMERA: chris morgan
1st AD: damien lay
1st AC: taylor smith
EDIT/VFX/POST: darkenergymedia
CAMERA: RED Scarlet
COLOUR: DaVinci
