PETE MULLER - NOT YOUR MAN
i’m particularly proud of this one. the last in a series of videos for pete muller’s DISSOLVE LP, ‘not your man’ was a very strong vision from the get go.
as soon as i heard the track it evoked NYC film noir type vibes for me. so i started playing around with concepts of how this could work - the idea of pete running from some prohibition-era tommygun-toting thugs crossed my mind - a few iterations of the idea existed before i finally settled on and pitched this final version.
the video features khrystyana kazakova, a model who i had shot previously on the final season of AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL a few years prior. she was my top choice both for her look as well as her amazing, collaborative attitude.
we see khrystyana’s femme-fatale-style character walking around new york… is she seeking pete? is she running from pete? that’s all up for interpretation. i always have my ideas of what a storyline is in a music video, but particularly for something as narrative as this, leaving space for people to tell their own story is far more compelling.
to that end, khrystyana’s character (to me) represents not only a strong, feminine human presence, but also the essence of the city. pete’s history and relationship with NYC provide an interesting take on the idea of the song as a love/hate letter to the city in addition to the more relationship-oriented themes of the song. this is further supported by our femme-fatale’s walk around the city ending up in times square, where she revels in her own glory while pete’s performance continues on the screens around her.
more about that in a bit.
khrystyana in character at hudson yards shooting not your man.
the crew was pretty minimal. producer dana gabrion was instrumental in making sure the pieces were in order for the very ambitious and tightly-scheduled shoot. blake brooks was an all-around rock star AC, going above and beyond to make getting shots quick and effective. wardrobe was handled by heather newberger, who got the vibe of the video and asked the perfect questions to make sure that khrystyana’s look was spot on and fit the vibe. similarly, hair and makeup artist nicolae rita dialed in an exceptional film noir femme fatale vibe. the talents and creativity of ALL of these people cannot be overstated. the video works so well precisely because each of them brought exceptional skill to the overall vision, and collaborating with the team was a joy.
the shoot took place over two days in NYC in may of 2019. day one started at sundown, and we had about 3-4 hours to get all of the shots of khrystyana around the city. luckily, we had access to steve wolmer, an ex-cop with a working knowledge of NYC streets unlike any i’ve previously seen! steve was able to get us in and out of iconic locations quickly, and had great suggestions of spots to stop with great backdrops. thanks to steve, the shoot spans from central park to the brooklyn bridge, chelsea, and times square. this resulted in a huge-feeling world where khrystyana truly seems to roam the entire city.
khrystyana’s elements were shot with the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K on the Zhiyun Crane 3 LAB. i had just purchased the Zhiyun a few days before leaving for NYC on this shoot, and was still working out the kinks, but both bits of gear performed exceptionally. the blackmagic camera’s low-light capabilities are pretty stellar, and DaVinci’s noise reduction ably cleans up whatever noise was resident in the image. beyond just that, however, what really mattered for this shoot was COLOUR REPRODUCTION from the low-light shots, and this is where the blackmagic really impressed me. more on that in the post bit!
day two was the band shoot, and we had The Cutting Room in times square as our stage location. the entire band performance is lit with practical stage lighting, and then one ARRI Skypanel S60 for a key light. setups were quick and pretty painless, with each section of the band being filmed individually both for performance footage as well as for the film noir poster elements to be composited in post. energy on set was great and we got through all of the performance shots in very short order.
one of the not your man horn section takes.
producer dana gabrion stands in for pete.
postproduction on not your man took quite a lot of work. it was just me on my own for the entire post process. refining my edit workflow is a constant struggle, but for this video, there were hundreds of shot elements that were painstakingly selected from the hours of principal footage and b-roll that were captured throughout the shoot. edit select timelines with colour-coded clips were the order of the day, and before long, a solid edit came into existence.
a deceptively simple-looking view of the master timeline for not your man in its early stages.
once the edit felt good, it was a question of identifying and executing the 20 VFX shots in the piece. this was to be a major undertaking, as i planned to keep the entire video procedural throughout. DaVinci’s integrated Fusion VFX package allows one to dive in to a clip on the edit timeline, execute extensive compositing and VFX, then step back out to the timeline, jump over to the colour page, and have a completed, composited shot on the master timeline that is entirely dynamic and editable.
breakdown of the 20 VFX shots in in not your man, as well as notes on fonts for the posters.
this strategy worked to a point, but as every element in this project from the primary footage to every single VFX plate and element were all full-res 4K BMRAW clips, at a certain point the project just stopped functioning. being able to dynamically manage so much data in such a complex way seems mind-boggling to me, and i’m actually pretty impressed things lasted as long as they did doing it this way, but it soon became apparent that i’d have to render out VFX shots and re-import them in order to finish the piece.
DaVinci utterly shined throughout this process, and it actually made things fun. this is not exactly my first “sticking things on walls” type music video, but it does represent a culmination of those ideas and techniques within a bigger vision. in terms of the performance of Fusion, i was well impressed. i’ve tracked and matchmoved footage in myriad applications, and even using noisy, low-light footage (which was a huge risk and slight unknown going in to post), i was able to solve matchmoves with insanely low pixel errors. some of you might not know what that means, but basically, the lower the pixel error, the more ‘solid’ the track appears, so elements placed in the 3D scene appear “stuck” to what they’re meant to be “stuck” to.
the poster elements were designed with alpha information, so they could be composited / altered quickly and easily if any changes needed to be made.
.06 solve error! this sort of thing is very exciting for nerds.
the colour for the piece was obviously a cheeky nod to the sin city aesthetic, isolating the reds in the scene and added elements. this is where i was most impressed with the BMPCC4K footage, as even in the very low-light footage, i was able to pull consistent, quality keys and selections based on colour data. the overall tonality of the images is really amazing, and the city really pops despite the unbelievably simple setups.
the biggest challenge technically proved to be the times square sequences. during the shoot, it had begun to rain, and this wreaked a bit of havoc with the camera tracker. pulling clean tracks on the shots with the screens proved technically impossible at its worst, and my grandiose ideas of filling all the screens in times square with images of pete had to be reigned in a bit. so those last couple of shots of times square didn’t quite have the punch i’d initially hoped, but good lessons were learned all the same.
not your man debuted on january 31st, 2020. i am pretty proud of this one, and i’m thrilled that the tools exist for a largely one-man-band to pull something like this off in post.
thanks to an amazing crew, band, and unfolding of circumstances that allowed this one to be so much fun.
‘not your man’ is available on Pete Muller’s LP DISSOLVE, available on streaming services everywhere.
DIRECTOR: chris morgan
PRODUCER: dana gabrion
AC: blake brooks
HMU: nicolae rita
WARDROBE: heather newberger
MODEL: khrystyana kazakova
POST: darkenergymedia
CAMERA: blackmagic BMPCC4K
STABILISER: Zhiyun Crane 3 LAB
VFX: Fusion (within DaVinci)
EDIT/COLOUR: DaVinci
