Welcome to the Jungle

About 6 months ago, I shot a remake music video for “Welcome to the Jungle” by the wonderful Nina Martinez. The re-recording of the song was also rerecorded by my good friend and producer/composer Jonas Friedman at Emerging Music Group, who also helped write the score and edit foley with me on the film as well.  An extremely talented man that Mr. Friedman is.

This was by far one of the most all-encompassing music videos I have worked on thus far. Nina and her team came to me with a tour-de-force comic book concept for the video; Nina to be a superhero saving young souls from the underworld of which they descend into. The video was shot at 5 different locations over the period of 4 days, primarily in Bridgeport, CT. Locations were meticulously scouted and dressed as well by our art director, Chris Hancock. We were fortunate to get permits for some locations from the city of Bridgeport with as little as 5 days before the shoot in some cases. We lucked out.

This video features several skit scenes.  I have done opening skits on the majority of the videos that I have worked on, however this one is far more ambitious in that respect.  This required tedious sound dubbing in post, and also the presence of proper sound capture and a gaffer on set for dialogue capture on set.  I had never actually worked with a sound crew or boom operator before, and Aaron Miller, who is pictured below, was a pleasure to work with.

This was the first major project that I used a Canon 5D2 to shoot on.  I have to say I very much enjoyed using it.  The size is liberating.  You can shoulder the camera easily and get it into plenty of tight spaces as well.  Of course there were the usual image artifacts, however every camera has its work-arounds.  All in all, the low light performance and shallow DOF was great.  Shooting in high light was difficult at times due to the sensitivity of the large sensors, so ND’s had to be used.  Again, a slight work around.

A very special thanks to all of our cast and crew on this video.  It was a moderately large endeavor and everyone came together to create a fantastic piece of work.  You know who you are.