Just A Couple More Miles - Latest Music Video!

Hey readers!

So I recently finished and released the latest music video we here at Daniel Rutter Films have produced, and the response has been great. A lot of people asking for a breakdown on how we filmed and what processes we used. I figured I'd write a blog post to break it down a little.

We filmed about 2 months ago over two days, with one day dedicated to the "Story" parts of the video and the other day for our "Live Performance".

Our first day of shooting started off with Bill coming to pick me up from Wellington, and we traveled to Molong and along back roads to Narromine to film our "Outback" shots. Bart Riley, a friend and regular collaborator came along for the shoot and ended up starring in the clip as a wayward city-slicker stuck in the middle of nowhere that Bill picks up.

Poor little city slicker stuck in the country!

Good Samaritan Bill gives the city slicker a ride.

Bart also served as our on-set photographer for the day, snapping off a few photos of the setup I used.

Filming an opening shot.

Although it never made it into the video, we had a guest appearance from a well known Albert showman who runs into Bill on his travels. Unfortunately Jason's clips didn't make the final cut... but it was still great to see him coming along to support us!

Cheers!

Day 2 of shooting happened about a week later, with friends of ours from the Dubbo RSL Music Club standing in as the backing band for our live performance. Tony, the Music Club president, supplied us with all the equipment needed and was also our lighting technician. Raelene (Tony's wife) was our onset photographer for this day.

Tony Dess, lighting maestro and crackin' keyboard player!

All about those closeups!

An early graded shot from the video. I went for a slightly different look in the final edit. Here you can see a little bit of our lighting setup.

My basic setup for the entire shoot was the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera with the Panasonic 14-42mm kit lens, a variable ND filter and a mix of my Benro Tripod with  Koolertron 60cm slider, and my Filmcity shoulder rig. Using the BMPCC was an absolute blast. I shot in Prores LT, though looking back I could have shot Prores HQ if needed. Why did I shoot Prores LT? Because I can't tell the difference between LT and HQ, and LT doesn't take up as much hard drive space.

For the editing process, I simply synced all our performance footage together (17 takes!), edited those down into a small selection of the best shots... and stitched them together. From there I simply edited in all the story footage, and did a grading pass in Magic Bullet Looks. The grade simply saturated the footage to boost the colours (as the original look out of the camera is very flat and muted), added some warmth to the skin tones, and added some flare and haze filtering for a few shots as well (more of a stylistic choice). For the story footage I wanted a more golden look, so for those I changed the grade up a little.

All in all the filming and editing process took about two months. It was a really easy shoot, and the end product was something I'm very happy with. I've said it a thousand times on social media, but without the help from the crew that stepped up we wouldn't have got what we have now. So a big shoutout goes to Tony and the RSL Music Club guys for making our live performance footage actually look live!

I'm really beginning to fall in love with the music video process. There's a lot of creative freedom in these kinds of clips, and I look forward to my next one!

Thanks for reading! Check out the final music video below.