I've just recently finished work on a music video for Hounds, a band I've worked with previously on a few occasions under their former incarnation of Little Joe Zero. The video was to be a very low budget, fast shoot, all taking place in a woodland area, which was ours for the day thanks to a good friend of the band. 

Olly, Chas & Chris had a pretty good idea of what they wanted to do and a sort of surreal horror vibe with a nod to the b -movie genre was the brief. Over coffee and a few rollies, we went over what props and costumes they had picked up from the fancy dress shop and worked out a rough plan for shooting. Ideally I would have shot this video on a combination of black & white 16mm and super 8, but budget and time being what they were this just wasn't an option. I'd recently started to shoot with a Panasonic GH1 DSLR and felt fairly confident that the camera would work well for this shoot, with my only doubt being, how well the footage stood up to heavy grading ( or in this case, heavy degrading ).

For the most part shooting the video using a DSLR was a positive experience, the form factor and speed of setting up a small camera in multiple locations with lens changes was a breeze. Most of my lenses and filters were all in one back pack, which allowed me to move a lot faster, only occasionally having to return to the cars to restock and eat. Moving the props, generator and ghetto blaster playback were probably far more time consuming. I shot on a combo of Olympus ZD lenses, for most of the handheld running around stuff and OM manual lenses for the set performance pieces. For the most part, I was shooting at around f4.

For the edit, I knew we were going for a mixed format look. I think the footage held up well to being pushed so far in post, with the main takes around the couch fairing best of all. The afternoons filming was pretty hilarious as you can imagine from watching the video.

Hounds have got this up on their youtube channel. Go here if you want take a look

www.youtube.com/houndstelevision

Ade