Commercial Breakdown (Onitsuka Tiger Spec)

welcome to a little breakdown session of my latest spec project a running commercial for the brand onitsuka [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] tiger bro you're late get in the booth already so if you haven't already seen the project that was a 30 second spot that we put out for Bandit's website as well as our Instagram release I also put out a director's cut that was a little bit longer here on my YouTube channel so if you haven't seen that make sure to go check that out as well also my man carsten who dpd this project just released a super in-depth cinematography breakdown so make sure to give that a watch as well Carson's killing it on YouTube and he was a huge part of making this project happen he's been on my channel a bunch of times so like I said before if you're watching any of my stuff and you don't already know who Carson is go give him a sub it is well worth it with all that being said let's jump right into the breakdown okay so first things first let's take a look into a bit of the prepro for this thing um like I do for all of my projects when I'm starting creative I always go into Mill note and I just throw in a bunch of references I have notes I have reference images um I have some music and if somebody brand new were to get the link to this and check out the homepage for the project they could understand in a few seconds what this thing's all about so um the first thing I want to show you guys is the inspo for this entire project so this is an Adidas app that popped up on my Instagram a couple months ago um I really like the running stuff the mixed media and kind of gave me the inspiration for this spot it's super short so yeah the mixed media thing was really what we wanted to hit on there was film high8 digital and all that coming together made this really cool Vibe this gritty authentic feeling piece that I really wanted to try and capture an RS so after that I gathered a few more reference videos a lot of stuff from Adidas um I made a mood board with a bunch of Stills and then it was time to get a little more specific and I jumped right into making a storyboard so as you can see just scrolling through the storyboard a little bit a lot of those reference images I used from the mood board all shots that I really liked and kind of wanted to try and emulate into my own storyboard so very rough um this was kind of like the first conceptualization of the piece itself um oh I also wanted to note that in the mood board um we have this other board uh that carsten made called the onitsuka tiger look Bible which was so helpful um when and we kind of came up with the concept carsten laid out a bunch more reference images to further like lock in our color palette uh because we had this very warm first scene the city was going to be much cooler and then again a darker more Moody Studio scene at the end so having this look Bible like super locked in beforehand was insanely helpful for communicating with the rest of our crew we had so many different teams for each day so there was some overlap but being able to communicate what the look was and what we were going for for each individual day was so much more helpful than just going in blind I also have some wardrobe in here just give you a glimpse this is a bunch of the pieces that we looked at trying to lay out outfits and figure out exactly what Malcolm was going to wear I was just surfing through depop trying to find some vintage onitsuka tiger some vintage as6 stuff um anything that really fit this like like retro 90s tracksuit kind of vibe um I also worked a lot with Malcolm to figure out his outfit like I said he's a fashion designer so um he brought his tank top he actually picked out the joggers that were this like silver grayish track pants and it matched really well with the green jacket that we found on depop depop was awesome it's kind of Hit or Miss sometimes but it's a great place to find some wardrobe for cheap if you're in a pinch it's like an online thrift store okay so the thing I really wanted to look at in Millan note here is the shot by shot um so this is the entire project this is how I saw the video playing out in my brain from start to finish um previously I've said how I really enjoy having flexibility in my edit and I think I've kind of used that as a crutch in the past I think it's easy to say oh I have flexibility in the edit and that is almost an excuse for doing less planning and pre-production um so carsten and colum both loved this concept and as we were doing more of the pre-pro I was having a little bit of a hard time explaining exactly what I wanted and Caron was like Hey man let's just make things easy and just show me exactly how the video is going to plan out do the shot by shot and at first I was a little bit hesitant but for his sake I was like all right let me try it out and it ended up being the most helpful thing for everyone so for myself as a director for Colin as a producer for shot logistics for planning um for car and communicating with the rest of the team and even for me in the edit like knowing exactly what shot was coming next um exactly what we wanted here's a little bit here's a little bit more of the piece and as you can see it's it's pretty similar to to exactly what we wanted I had you know some funny stupid reference photos that we had on our location Scouts um these three quick cutting scenes um all the way down to the textures um pretty much everything thing was was mapped out for the most part um and again that made it so helpful um have the little clock drawing in here Mill notes super helpful uh with that and then yeah that's pretty much it I even had like the seconds of the song So when the beginning synth was playing can kind of hear it so when that synth is playing for the first 5 to 8 seconds I want these textures to be happening and then as soon as it drops we see Malcolm running yeah so shot by shot was so helpful so now that that is out of the way let's jump right into the edit this is the final picture locked version I've said in other videos that I love making sequences for every one of my cuts so as you can see there's a ton of sequences up here um everything from you know rough cuts to fine cuts to picture locks to mixes um having different sequences for different versions of your Cuts allows you to have a history of everything that you've worked on so if you need to go back to a version it's easy to just copy and paste from one timeline put it into a new timeline but yeah the first thing that I like to do when I start and edit on a new project is to take all my footage and dump it into a clean timeline so that I can go through pull selects and kind of cut out different pieces that I know are going to be important for the story so that's exactly what I did um there was a lot of cameras on the this project I think in New York City alone we had six cameras that day I don't think I explained this in the BTS which I don't know how I missed that but there was six cameras we had Carston's fx3 that was our main handheld rig we also had Nick Brady's fx3 that was hooked up to a gimbal for all of our running tracking skateboard shots we had Kyle abadaka fx3 he was doing textures James also had an fx30 that he was using for textures and then they were also carrying around this like handy cam like high8 digital thing um and then lastly I had a super eight camera that I was shooting with a bunch it was super helpful to just take those cameras and put them into separate timelines so as you can see we have day one this is everything from day one day two this is the digi string so this is all the handy cam stuff day two this is our actual string from the handheld in Gimbal and as you can see I colorcoded um the this is the handheld stuff it's just kind of like lighter blue and then all the stuff on the gimbal is this darker blue um this stuff is the crossing the street shots that James shot for us up on the bridge um the next one this is all the super eight footage again in one timeline and then lastly for day two at least this is the texture shots um from both Kyle and James so again I just went through through watched like every take and um if I liked a clip I would throw it on the second track and if I really like to clip I would throw it on the third track and then you can just copy and paste the stuff that you want and then put it in a new into a new timeline and then you have your selects so um that was super easy for my editing process it's kind of the same for every project I talked about it in my last editing breakdown but um I always kind of do the same thing starting out just to get familiar with my footage and and start watching stuff so um yeah and this was the day three stuff I don't think I color coded this one just because I got a little bit lazy but you get the idea so so yeah a lot of moving pieces I think for my sake it helped to stay organized this way um just having folders separated out for different days different cameras um to have everything in different places organized and labeled and yeah the edit itself changed a ton um even though I had the meticulous shot by shot and I knew exactly how the video was going to play out we just had so much footage there was so many cameras and there were so many good options so um you know the flow was pretty much the same for through every version but just the shots were changing and and each shot was so different that it completely changed the project so we went through so many versions so many rough Cuts so many fine cuts to finally get our picture lock and we actually ended up with two versions of this project we came up with a 30second cut that was um much more for Bandit and for our Instagram release Colin releas wanted a tight 30-second cut that would be used for Bandit's website and I totally understand from a production company standpoint you want to show that you can make a 30-second cut uh like a real commercial um from my point of view as a director I want to tell the best story that I can so that's why I ended up with a little bit longer of a cut and both turned out pretty similar but um it was cool to have both of those also a fun note we shot everything 16x9 but framed for 5x3 so it's kind of a happy medium between 4x3 and 16x9 it's not as boxy as 4x3 but it's also not as stretched as 16x9 so um it makes you feel a little bit more connected to the main character a little bit more confined to the story itself but it's not as jarring as that 4x3 so um that was super fun to play around with as well so while we're here I wanted to take you through a couple of sequences that I had a lot of fun editing the first one being this whip pan to the phone um so obviously this is not a real whip um this is two different shots that we have here the first one being a push in on Malcolm and I see here's the ding of the phone we whip to the phone and that is a completely different shot so I think the hardest part for me and for this sequence was getting the motion exactly right so as you can see the direction of the whip in this first shot had to match exactly with the whip Direction in the second shot and it was honestly a lot harder than you think to get them to line up so um the main thing for me was the motion but I think this take turned out that I didn't press play on the screen quick enough the timing was a bit off on the text what we did for the phone itself was this was just a screen recording of my lock screen um I changed Carston's contact a couple days before to producer with a devil Emoji fire emoji and um I had him text me while I screen recorded my my iPhone screen um and uh yeah that was kind of just what we used I would press play on the screen recording before we rolled and then he would do the Whip and then we would have it pop up so um that's what we did for that but like I said the motion on this take was perfect but the timing of the text was not so what I ended up doing once the whip stops we have a still frame um and super easy to just make a cut because the frame is not moving um you can't tell that uh we've just jumped in time so right here um the clip itself I can actually show you doesn't pop up yeah so as you can see the timing is way off um and it just didn't work but um the motion was perfect so I prioritized that and was able to kind of cheated a little bit here um ended up working out perfectly so yeah then you go into the rest as far as the city stuff um like I said we did a bunch of Super Eight um that was all this stuff when we got it scanned it was like scanned a little bit funny so these crops were kind of off normally you have that like 4x3 crop with the you know full black mat that was a little bit weird and we wanted to really see a dramatic change from uh the normal digital fx3 shots to the Super Eight so we ended up putting like a film m on there it is real super eight footage um but I guess the mat on there is fake so there's a little tidbit of info um I did a lot of like digital zooms uh in the Super Eight this was all just like crash zooms with the lens um but like this shot is like just a digital Zoom this shot is actually reversed smoothed out and zoomed in with a bunch of motion blur um I did a ton of like this was digital Zoom they're all so quick but all this highend energy motion stuff um just added to the energy um and I think when you're editing a piece like this the energy and the motion is what matters the most um so um matching the motion was important so as you know we're coming in on this street um you're moving forward and then as you're zooming in on this Lantern also moving forward um to moving up these trees up the building and then pushing in on the shoes um all this momentum carries through and I think building momentum in a piece is super important when you're going through an edit especially like this this was super fun it was Punchy um also catering to the story um in this director's cut um I really wanted to build out the world of Chinatown so you have this super eight um you're seeing the landscape you're seeing and hearing the clock um and you know kind of this Race Against Time type Vibe um Le up to the actual shoes and him running so yeah this drag shutter shot was fun this is something that I look for um it doesn't have to be drag shutter but anytime something passes over the camera um I like to look for other shots that something also passes over the camera to reveal something so um you know this is where the cut happens it's you know a car and a truck that are relatively similar looking um and it kind of just creates this white transition feel which um there's other ways to do it there's like super meticulous frame rotoscoping that you can do but you know I think this looks just as good um I actually reversed this clip because so the birds are actually flying backwards um which is fun um but yeah this little pigeon sequence again to kind of build out the world um I had fun with um and I also just thought it was cool because I got some super R footage of pigeons that I really liked um so it matched in with the stuff from the fx3 and then yeah more running stuff this is just a truck that again matches with a forklift that was in front of this shot of Malcolm running again a small digital Zoom here coming in on him then we have our product shot this was a pretty important shot to nail we actually ended up coming back to do this a second time when the lighting was a lot better again the sound design really helps to make it feel like this big moment as it slows down we shot it at 120 frames per second um and then he speeds on by um the next shot also going back to the motion um really aligns uh with like the momentum of this sequence so it's like um he's running right to left running right to left stepping and then we have the sign whipping in from right to left so those three shots really just make you feel that momentum carrying through um it would be weird if there was a shot of him going from left to right and then another shot going going right to left um in certain cases it works um but for this we really wanted to carry the momentum so anytime he's changing direction we needed some sort of texture shot to put in between again coming through the camera um this was just a fun little shot of of an old guy hanging out in the park and we wanted to make it feel like he kind of whizzed by um and he's like watching him run by um but yeah that was fun and then again as he's looking left to right we need need Malcolm to be coming from left to right as he's crossing the street so also um another editing note I just I always try and match footsteps to again like subconsciously it just feels like more of a fluid motion if you do it this way so as you can see his left foot is about to hit the ground right here um so in the next shot I wanted his left foot to be hitting the ground um it it's super small thing but like subconsciously matching that motion just again helps with your momentum and makes it feel super natural as he's running through the city it feels like even though these are in completely different places and even though he's in the street and then on the sidewalk it kind of feels like a continuous movement um if that makes sense and then this final sequence leading up to the studio um I wanted to be tight in on his shoes and then I wanted to kind of slow down so we punch back out we see his full body he's running in slow motion before going super wide and seeing him run into the studio real time the music Fades out we hear some diagetic sounds of the city and now he's in the studio um so that was the city sequence as far as the studio stuff goes um nothing crazy this was pretty shot for shot in the shot by shot um so once we kind of had the flow figured out in the running sequence we were able to kind of slow things down here um the goal for the clock um is I actually shot this in my room this was me I went and bought a clock at Target and um it's not on a wall it's literally on a table and I just shot top down and shine a light um and it looks like it's kind of on a wall I used uh little diopter to kind of get that tick um but yeah the idea was that you know when he got the text it was 3:15 and it's still 3:15 only seconds later and it's like he made it you know even though he's still late the onitsuka shoes got them there you know in seconds so and then we did a bunch more diopter stuff just for these like quick cutting to kind of match the beginning again building momentum is kind of like the thing so moving forward turning up the volume and then we see um we see the dial go up until we press record and then this last shot is just a kind of pedestal up um Carson talked a little bit about the cinematography of this shot in his breakdown so definitely go check that out but our final frame as he's kind of just like vibing out doing his thing again the song choice that we used was Malcolm song Japan it was like perfect he sent me all the stems he sent me the instrumental and that was super helpful I can show you in the um this picture lock version I have the stems actually here um let me show you so you know for this section you kick it in Japan is like the chorus and I it comes in a little bit later there's other lyrics but um we wanted really to just focus on the kick it in Japan part so um for the stems what we ended up doing uh I can open it timeline um I used the synth and then you you hear the synth start and then the 808 comes in and then everything else um and then I sync that with the actual song um [Music] yeah kicking yeah so you get the idea yeah I'm super proud of this project and I'm so happy the way it turned out both versions The 302nd the 502nd but um yeah again I'm so thankful for everybody that had a hand in this project yeah I'm excited for what's to come so if you made it this far thanks for watching and I'll see you next time peace [Music]

Channel: Pat McGinley

Views: 2,728

Keywords: Pat McGinley, Danny Gevirtz, Canon, Canon R5, Film, Carlo Stigliano, Breakdown, Pre Production, Milanote, BTS, Behind the Scenes, Short Film, Documentary, Mini Doc, Black Magic Pocket 6K, DaVinci Resolve, Carsten Schlag, Sony FX3

Id: 3jZzYHS2E4I

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2024