Ben's Alcohol music video

As part of Ben's Sex, Drugs, Alcohol and RAGE experiment, he's been doing a fresh song each week accompanied by a new music video. Without any prodding, I volunteered to help out however I could, mainly in post-production, to facilitate his ambitious goal of a song/video each week, but this last week's entry had me a little more hands-on as I agreed to take on the task of shooting and editing the video this last weekend. I heard the song for the first time Friday night and said to him, "I see you on a roof - MY ROOF - performing the song in a single static shot that would feature you acting out the song in different capacities." What I meant by that is that we'd set the camera in a single fixed position and then let Ben act out the song say dramatically with a girl, alone with guitar, with bottle, etc..

What ultimately happened is the result above - I quickly realized that the lighting on my roof (in 100 degree heat much less) wasn't going to suffice for a fixed camera approach, and so the handheld multi-pass jumble was the logical compromise. Ultimately, it gave us both more freedom to do what we needed to get the job done. Sherry got lassoed in at the last minute to hold a flexi-disc to bounce some light onto the subject while I captured him with my mini-DV camera sporting a cheap fish-eyed lens. I did the edit as a multi-clip pass in FCP, then had to spend some time re-syncing the individual clips because his performance was slipping out with the mixed track once I got down to editing it. All in all, probably four hours spent making it...