Suzie McNeil "Supergirl"

Song: "Supergirl"
Artist: Suzie McNeil
Director: Carlos Lopez Estrada
Producer: Christian Heuer

It's been about a week since we shot and we have just finished final color correction. This video was produced in an extremely short amount of time and a very small budget. Suzie is on Universal records and climbing the pop charts in Canada with this song.


The video involves a standard performance with Suzie in front of an LED curtain that had been installed onstage. Images and animations were run through a computer and displayed on the curtain, roughly 50'x30'. The video cuts between performance and a very basic narrative with Suzie. She plays a hero character that moves through several scenes in order to save a man in distress. The color schemes were very predominant in giving the scenes a comic and poppy feel to compliment the upbeat song. One of the selling points was also a 8' turntable on which everything took place. The scenes played out on the rotating platform, which produced a very display-like quality to the action.

The video was shot on RED 4k with Zeiss Standard Speeds. We were able to achieve a very shallow depth of field, which was crucial to take advantage of the LED curtain. Throwing the lens out of focus would produce very nice Bokeh with the points of light. When in focus, the LED curtain was not nearly as predominant. The same curtain can be seen in Akon's video "Beautiful".

Our post workflow proved to be a huge learning experience. This was the first time I have had a RED project go through a higher end grading system. We used Autodesk Lustre to handle color and Smoke to handle conforming the EDL and doing timewarps. The project was thrown out of wack because of several oversights while shooting. We had been recording edge code, meaning each new camera roll (SD card) would start at 1hr. The proper way would have been to shoot with free running time code, which would have saved the EDL confusion of having multiple roles with the same time code. On top of that, several cards had not been formatted when loaded into the camera, which caused a gap in the labeling of the rolls. While it was great to color on Lustre, the confusion and time solving problems might not have been worth it in the end. There are still issues matching timewarps and cuts that are slightly off.