Devin Ellis

"Made to Break" Music Video

2/19/2011

Last month my cousin Mike asked me to shoot a music video for the local band Made to Break. He was producing their new album and had an idea for a video of one of their new songs.

The location was a rundown shed on an overcast day. We spent about an hour clearing everything (well most everything) out of the room. The band had spent the past few days painting a small upright piano that they bought at a thrift store. So we started shooting the parts with Matt, the lead singer, “playing” piano by himself. It was weird because there isn’t actually any piano in the song.

Anyways, we shot drums, full band, and some shots with a crowd behind Matt. It was pretty fun, we were able to integrate some of their most loyal fans into the music video.

This was the first major video project I used my Canon 60D for. Yes, I switched to Canon. Mostly using my 50mm f1.4 at f2, since it was pretty dark in there. The other lens I used was my 16-25 f2.8. I also used my DIY Igus Dolly for most of the shots, but as I got more courage I shot hand-held some parts.

I ended up filling my 8gb SD card, but I was able to dump it to my iPad using the camera connector kit. I had no idea video would fill up the card so fast! I ended up filling it again at the very end of the shoot, so a total of 16gb of raw footage.

For color grading I used Magic Bullet Mojo, a cheap Premiere plugin that applies a pretty specific color grading effect. It was good enough for our purposes and saved me a lot of time trying to figure something out with the default effects.