Cinematography Breakdown: Lighting for a Long Tracking One Take Music Video

Are you a fan of one-take music videos?! Have you ever wondered how pro cinematographers achieve the perfect cinematic, lighting, and steadicam shots without any seeing lights or stands? If you're looking for insight on the difficulties of creating one-take music videos, you've come to the right place! In this video, I breakdown a recent one take music video that I was assigned to DP & steadicam operate for.

Here are a handful of my favorite frames from the video:

This was a music video project that I had the opportunity to DP & Steadicam for, and what made it more fun/challenging was that we were approaching it as a one take video that’s heavily choreographed and timed. 

So the idea came about from Daniella, who’s a great music video director and did a fantastic job on this whole project. 

The story starts on a wide shot of a car pulling into the driveway of the house. We see a couple in the car. Once the car stops, the female passenger gets out, shuts the car door, walks into the house, and we transition into a choreography of this couple moving through the different rooms in the house and telling a story of intense emotion and pain to each other.

The director(Daniella Mason) and I had to come up with a way to do this in one take because we had an opportunity to work with an incredible choreographer who could design and time all the movements that move throughout the whole house.

Lighting

We used geminis, multiple vortex, 300ds and bicolor lite panels, a sky panel, and practical lights to light this whole house.

My first challenge was to figure out where to hide all the lights. The difficulty with shooting a one take in a house with windows is that you’re trying to hide all your lights from all your windows. The best way to do this is to light in an angle that you won’t see the fixture in your frame.

Since we were shooting at night, we took the afternoon to start prepping and building lights to shoot from 8-midnight.

Camera & Movement

This video was shot on the Sony Venice with a 12mm Laowa and Angeniuex Optimos 50mm. For filtration, I had 1/8 hollywood blackmagic.

We wanted to shoot on a wide 12mm lens to get a sense of space and be able to get up close to. We used Optimo primes for the opening shot and close ups that we got further into the shoot. 

Since it was going to be a one take, the only way to have a smooth stabilized shot is to do it either with a steadicam operator or ronin/movi op. I’ve been operating for about two years and was able to fill in the gap between having to pay two rates saving the producer some budget

A big lesson from this shoot was that pre-production is where all the work is done. There are many line items that need to line up in order to pull this off, and many hands to be involved. The more prep that you do, the less improvisation you need on shoot day.