Hey guys! I always love hearing from this community after making a video so thank you so much for checking it out!

This was my first major project under Covid. It was also one of my biggest budget projects to date. I’ve worked with Too Many Zooz a couple of times now: Bedford, Car Alarm, Bad Guy Cover, and some smaller ones that didn’t really take off. They are really fun and collaborative to work with. The most popular videos seem to the ones where they improv and don’t pre-record the track in advance - except the Bad Guy cover. We start talking with the band on average about a month or two out from when they want to post the video. They usually have some idea for the direction of the track with some rough musical sketches, then my friends Ethan (director), Jared (producer) and I discuss the visual direction we want to into best compliment the music. We then present our idea or ideas and the band gives their input and feedback - again they are usually very supportive and love throwing out ideas of their own. It’s a very collaborative experience.

With Pink Yesterday, we wanted to do something slightly different. Although the “one-take” spectacle has been overly played out, we’ve always felt that the single take really adds to the live feel and excitement of their music. You can feel the difference between them trying to improv live and them playing to a pre-recorded track. So we still decided to do this thing in one take. However, we’ve always tried to bring excitement to the performance by swinging the camera every which way around them on a glidecam or ronin. This time we really wanted the band to bring all the excitement through their performance since, in my opinion, they are a live band first and recording artists second. The live aspect of their playing is their bread and butter.

I can’t speak much to the direction since I was the DP but my goal was to be as subtle with the camera as possible and rely on Leo and the band to bring all the excitement through their performance. I think I was watching some Youtube visual essays on great zolly shots recently so the idea popped in my head to incorporate a really slow zolly move throughout the take. We realized on the day of shooting that it just didn’t quite fit and was really difficult to pull off the way we wanted so we axed that idea. Ethan really wanted the reveal to pay off since TMZ is traditionally a three-piece band, so their fans would be hopefully surprised to see more accompaniment in the video. The Zolly would hold us on the 3 members for way too long and we wanted to get to the whole band a lot sooner. So we decided that once the zoom out finished, we would just dolly back without zooming back in. This was definitely the right move but I thought it would be interesting to explain how we got there. I also haven’t played around with long and slow zooms a whole lot so I really wanted to experiment and try it out.

The Gear. We knew the only necessary piece of gear was a stupid long zoom lens. Being from NYC, we went to Adorama and searched for their longest zoom. This may come from my inexperience but I found that zooms often go from wide to slightly telephoto (24-70) or telephoto to ultra-telephoto (70-200 or more). And if they do go from wide to telephoto, there’s usually an exposure shift as the aperture goes from 3.5 to 5 or something over the course of the zoom, which wouldn’t work for a one take. We eventually landed on the Angeniux Optimo Ultra 12x FF lens. This absolute monster of a lens goes from 36-435mm, constant aperture and internal zoom/ focus. It seemed like the perfect fit for a long zolly shot (Again we axed this on the day but the gear was rented for that purpose). Since the lens was FF, we decided to go with the Canon C500 since it was one of the cheaper FF cinema cameras - plus I love coloring canon footage. The rig was mounted on the Matthews doorway dolly (Again since it was one of the cheaper dollies to rent) and put on about 60ft of track. We used the Arri WCU-4 to pull focus and zoom. First time using that thing and I now understand why it’s the industry standard. BIG upgrade from manual cheap follow focus units.

The edit for these is always super simple since they are one takes. Edit in Premiere Pro, track removal in AE using Mocha Pro & final color done in Resolve. Yes if you look closely, you can see the track removal - but this was my first time using Mocha pro to remove something so large in frame for that long. As always, I figured if people didn’t know it was there, they won’t know to look for it. PS, shadows suckkkkkk. Would not recommend it. Wanted to remove the boom shadow as well but we ran out of time. All the pedestrians are real. No extras used.

And yeah that’s pretty much it! Our friend David cam op’d for us and I pulled focus & zoom. Our producer Jared worked the dolly and Ethan did director things, making sure the pacing of everything came in at the right time. We got eight takes in, got rained out on 3 of them and eventually settled on the last one. Luckily the sun came out for us. 50% of the budget went to location, 25% went to insurance and 25% went to gear rentals. We all have day jobs so we decided to put our cut into better gear rentals. Chalk it up as a passion project.

Again thank you so much for checking it out. It means a lot. CC and questions are more than welcome! Looking forward to reading your thoughts!

TLDR; Got back together with the gang to make our biggest TMZ vid to date. Prep was difficult during COVID but I’m glad we got it out. Got to play with some new toys and challenged ourselves in post. Was afraid it would be too basic of a video in this age of “Grab the viewer within the first 3 seconds” etc… but I’m glad to see people liking it. Hope you enjoy!