I am a sleep-balling me, wing my inner back. Hello my friends, you're watching Hard Video with Stuff and today for you, I'm going to show you how I get about filming singer songwriters. Now I know this video is called How to Film a Singer, but of course this isn't the only way to do it. I'm hoping this gives you ideas and that you find it just interesting and helpful. I filmed an unplugged studio video for Rising Folkstar Jack Cuxon, he's super talented, he played Glasto, Festival this year in 2019 and it was just a really cool project. I shot the video at the amazing Axe and Trapped Studios in Wells and of course I want to say a special thank you to Ben and Alex for letting me do it. Everything I mentioned in this video is linked below details of the studio, the artist, Jack, all the gear I use to film it and of course the final music video which will be over on Jack's channel. So the space I had to film in was the studio's live room which they've done a great job of getting it looking just amazing. Of course if you've ever been to a studio inevitably after a time they start looking like music, industry museums and Axe and Trapped isn't exception, they've got interesting vintage gear all over the place. So the first thing I did was walk the room just looking for anything that could be a distraction and then I moved them to clear the space so it just looked more sort of nice and spacious. I then turned my attention to the lighting, the room has lots of different types of lights with different colour temperatures which actually looked kind of cool but of course ideally for video it's good to control all aspects of the lighting so I turned everything off so that I could set up my own lights and get it looking really amazing. In the background you can see I've got blue and red fairy lights on the left and right walls and then another set which are daylight coloured on the floor. And what this does is create lots of little bokeh balls in the background which I think look lovely and just accentuate the depth of the shots. Next I put up my key light, in this case I used an aperture C300 with a light Dame for beautiful diffusion. I set it up to the left of our artist so that it would create a little bit of shade on the other side of his face and it's also worth noting that I had to turn it down to its lower setting. If you've ever used this light you'll know just how bright it is. The C300 is, it's very flattering light and perfect for lighting a subject like this. I then set up two LED panels behind the artist and again I set the lights up on their minimum power. Anything else would have been way too bright. The reason why I'm keeping all of my lights low is that I want a nice balance between our key light, back lights and the fairy lights in the background. Some people would rather raise the back lights out of the shots so they're not visible. But personally I love the look of having the lights visible because you get that sort of amazing silhouette on your subject and loads of kind of lens flare and that kind of thing. It just looks cool. Next let's look at the angles I captured and the lens of the I used. The first shot I captured was a safety shot as I call it, the one that I can use if everything else goes wrong and I used a Canon 35mm F2IS lens. As you can see I've got some gentle movement using a slider, just gives it that kind of back and forth nice bit of movement. I wanted to get an alternative mid-distance shot so I slung it on my Sigma 50mm F1.4 art which is a lovely lens. This meant I could get a little bit more background blur and it's a really nice shot looking image. It just gave me an alternative to the original safety shot if I needed to cut for any reason. I then moved the camera back, I stayed with the same lens the 50mm and this shot was really just so I could have a bit more context so I could see more of where Jack was sat and what the studio looked like and it's nice sharp, super detailed. Next I wanted a close up of Jack's face with some flare so I put on my Canon 85mm F1.8 which is a nice very cheap, very good value lens. I really did like the flare I got from this angle, you can see it cutting in and out from over his shoulder. One wise in this shot I just had the camera on the tripod with the fluid head loose so I could just follow the natural movement of his head. And so I wanted even more detail so I got a shot of him playing the guitar and the one thing that was tricky with this is he does play the song differently every single time he plays it. He's just kind of improvisational like that. So during the editing phase I had to cherry pick the moments where he was playing the same as in the recording and they were more than I expected so I managed to get quite a few of these shots in the final edit. I'm using the same lens again, the Sigma 50mm because it's lovely. I finished up by guessing just an even closer shot of the solo section as Jack calls it. Just where he plays a little sort of extended bit on the guitar and it's pretty cool. It's just where he's not singing and I wanted to capture something interesting to look at whilst he's not singing. Even wise these shots are handheld because I wanted that sort of natural motion. And finally I got a really close up of just one moment during the song where he does just a nice little harmonic thing on the guitar and I just wanted to highlight it in the final cut so I got this. So once I've captured all the footage I needed I got it into final cut and here is how I edited and graded it to get it to the final video. So in our editing software I took all the clips and synced them all to the master track using the multi-cam function in final cut pro. Definitely check out my video about multi-cam if you want to know more about how to use it. And I've added an adjustment layer over the whole thing so I can add my effects and it will affect the whole video. You can see my chain of plugins I'm using, I'm using colour wheels, colour curves, a lookup table, a second lookup table, a letter box. And then a vignette. The first thing I'm going to do is to turn on my lookup table and see where we stand. This to me looks pretty good but I know I can get it looking better. So in my colour wheels I'm just going to bring the exposure down a tiny bit and the saturation down a little bit. I'm going to nudge my shadows a tiny bit into that source of turquoise blue and that's it. I also nudge my colour temperature so it's slightly cooler as well. You'll see why in a bit. I added an instance of colour curves which I did just a gentle massage of the contrast curve but I think you'll agree when I turn all of it on it makes a surprising difference. It just adds a nice little bit of grit and detail to the skin tones and just more contrast where I wanted it to be. I know what you're thinking, I've already got a lookup table applied, why on earth will I apply a second one. Well all I'm doing with this is I'm adding 8% of a different lookup table and it's the ice blue lookup table from Phantom and it just adds a really nice quality to the blues. It makes them slightly deeper and I like what it does to the skin tones as well. I toyed with the idea of adding a letter box to make the videos seem a little bit more cinematic but in the end I thought well I probably should have shot the whole thing a little bit more wide so I've got more room on the top and bottom so I didn't use the letter box. Finally I just added a vignette. Just a little bit I made sure there was no blur around the edges which is the default setting in this plugin and I didn't go as heavy as I have done in the past. Just a little bit and it really sort of just helps to focus the eye into the centre of the frame. But here you can see the before and after and really it boils down to a nice place to film, some good lighting, a good lookup table and really just a good song. Please make sure you click through to see the full video on Jack's channel, it's worth it, it's a really great song. And that's it for now, I hope you found this interesting, helpful and informative. I've got a large by catalog of videos about video on this channel of which YouTube recommends this one for you and the one below will be my latest video. If you're not already subscribed, definitely do it, hit the blog, it'll just be over this side and until next time let's help each other out and shoot better video. See you guys.