Lighting Music Videos For Prestonwood's Songs of the People: Revival

By Marian Sandberg Jan 16, 2019 10:22am

Prestonwood Worship’s second volume of original modern worship music, Songs of the People: Revival, led to several projects for UVLD designer Matt Webb, who was one of Live Design/LDI's 30 Under 30 in 2018. As recording was underway for the EP, Prestonwood’s creative director Andy Pearson reached out to Webb to tackle production design, with Blaine Hogan directing a series of music videos for the new project.

“The videos were shot at Brake & Clutch, an industrial event space in Dallas’ Deep Ellum neighborhood,” Webb says. “Knowing that we would have to approach things differently—working in the single-camera film medium of this project—I was still keen to feature the heavily-cued, bold lighting that Andy and I typically do together.” From that point, the challenge of the project became two-fold: Webb had to create three distinct looks and visual treatments for the songs, and he needed to strike a balance between camera and production design. Hogan’s next call was to his go-to DP, Bjorn Amundsen.

For the song “This House Is Yours,” the team set out to create a sense of visual scale and lean into the gritty rock current of the song in the video capture. Working in the larger of Brake & Clutch’s two spaces, the band was placed around a series of columns, giving a long alley of three walls to shoot down. Pearson wanted to make sure the visuals pulled the lyrical phrasing into the screen. With the generous real estate, projection was a natural choice for this video. Using nine small Sanyo 5kW projectors, images filled large spaces of the walls and projected onto the ceiling and directly on the musicians.

Content designer Jordan Monk created atmospheric visuals that looked great on the surfaces and provided a layer of aerial texture through the haze of the room. Monk then keyed emphasized phrases from the lyrics over the top, accenting key parts of the chorus and bridge. A set of moving lights and LED washes wrapped around the room, creating a star field at the song’s opening and building into dynamic movements and percussive hits.

“From there, Blaine really took things and ran with them,” Webb says. “Bjorn key-lit the band with Astera Ax1 PixelTubes and ARRI [SkyPanel] S60-Cs glowing the band to get them exposed for the camera but maintaining depth in the look.”

Prestonwood_UVLD

Photo courtesy of Iris Lee

For “More Than A Song,” the setup was in a more intimate environment in the warehouse, which features a fantastic smaller room with one wall of white-washed brick and another flat grey.

“Amundsen suggested that we shoot with the corner of these walls as our upstage point,” Webb says. “Since we didn’t want to repeat the visuals of the first song, we steered clear of any video projection in the design.” Blaine suggested a great visual reference from a music video that was simply a sofa placed in front of a wall. Webb ran with this concept and lit the wall from the bottom with lush color gradients. To fill in the space, he placed 24 AX1 PixelTubes around the band with additional tubes up-lighting the players. Webb took advantage of full lighting console control of the tubes to program intricate movement and hits with an intentional, low-res kind of video quality to them.

Prestonwood_UVLD

Photo courtesy of Iris Lee

“Being With You,” the final song shot, began with a more stripped-down, acoustic feel. Pearson and Hogan were keen to incorporate the context of the Deep Ellum neighborhood. To that end, this video begins with the vocalists at an exterior location; the video follows them as they walk through the streets. Then, as they enter the space in Brake & Clutch, they’re lit with only a single downlight. As the song builds into the final chorus, the room lights up in a heavy tungsten treatment created by Amundsen using the existing chandlers, string lighting, and a large array of Fresnel units off the grip truck.

“It was an incredible experience and a real pleasure to stretch into a different realm of design than I typically work in for this project,” Webb says. “The opportunity to collaborate with Hogan and Amundsen was a dream for someone like me, being somewhat foreign to the medium of a film shoot. There’s always a huge team to make something like this happen, especially in three days. Nick Deel with Gemini Stage Lighting was the production electrician, John Dempsey was the gaffer on the camera lighting side with grip, and electrical provided by MPS Film. Prestonwood’s Sieun Ye co-programmed with me on this as well.”

Prestonwood_UVLD