VSSTÖ ÖH-Wahlaufruf Video

The VSSTÖ needed a second video as a reminder for students to go vote … for Sara Velić.

Checking the weather every few hours …

The video was supposed to be similar in style to the previous one, which consisted of shots of the Talent sitting on stairs, looking into the camera and Cool B-Roll of the things she mentions in the Voice over.

I didn’t just want her to sit there awkwardly, so I wrote a few different concepts for them to choose from.
They settled for the one where a girl throws her notes into the air out of frustration, and it is edited as to look as if it was continuously raining papers but part with the girl throwing the papers was rejected, since they didn’t deem their acting skills good enough for it.
So it ended up as a very aesthetic and artsy downpour of paper.

The main challenges we were prepping for the shoot were:

• It was supposed to be output horizontally and vertically
• Since she wanted to talk directly into the camera, we needed to record audio.
• I wanted cool lighting so we had to get up at 4am 🙁
• Choosing the right day for the shoot, since the weather kept changing daily.

What didn’t help was the fact that my brand new heavy steadycam had a manufacturing defect and was being serviced at the time, so i had to build this monstrosity, which looks like it is taken straight out of mad max.
But at least it gave me a relatively light weight setup to work with and wireless video and focus control for Pilar to pull focus with. Except that “light weight” is the last thing you want when operating a steadycam, so it was very difficult to keep it steady, especially once you take wind into the equation.

We wrapped 3 hours early.

The production itself went really smooth. I aimed to wrap at 12:30. We finished at 9:30. I will forever brag about this. Of course the call sheet was written very pessimistically, but still …

The shoot went like this:

1. Record Sara talking into the camera
2. Grabbing shots of Them walking into the sunset, standing around and doing their Close Ups
3. Film Sara walking, while everyone else throws paper from outside the frame
4. Recording the Voice Over on location, as to save time.

The part I especially feared was number 3. How far can one throw paper? Will it fly the way i need it to? Is the wind going to screw us? Surprisingly everything turned out to be rather easy. Of course there was a learning curve, but we figured out how to do it within minutes and were done with that segment after 15 minutes or so. That blew my mind honestly. You can sort of tell the sequence of events by looking at the position of the sun.

The edit went really smooth actually. I was done within a few days. The most difficult part was the colour grading, it needed to somewhat look like it’s predecessor. I kept the teal in the background shadows, while maintaining the original tones of skin and hair.

Vertical video is scary. But i think it turned out okay, despite cropping out 2/5 of the people in the group shot.