DaVinci Resolve 11 and the Blackmagic Cinema Camera present in the production 'Wolf Bite', the latest music video by Owl City

The video shows people dressed as werewolves dancing and riding bicycles through the streets of New York. The sequence shot by cinematographer Tim Buttner and directed by Andrew William Ralph contains artistic elements with different lighting conditions and various special effects.

Wolf Bite, Owl City's latest music video was shot entirely with the Cinema Camera from Blackmagic, while grading was carried out with DaVinci Resolve 11. The video corresponds to the artist's most recent song and is one of the first projects completed with the latest version of DaVinci Resolve.

Wolf Bite is part of Ultraviolet, the latest CD from Owl City that follows other hits such as Fireflies, Vanilla Twilight y Good Time (a duet with Carly Rae Jepsen). The video shows people dressed as werewolves dancing and riding bicycles through the streets of New York. The sequence shot by cinematographer Tim Buttner and directed by Andrew William Ralph contains artistic elements with different lighting conditions and various special effects.

Buttner acknowledges that "when I spoke to Andrew before filming began, we decided that the video should have a rather artistic and open look, considering that he was going to add animations later. The first thing he asked me to do was shoot the moon. However, the full moon phase had ended a few days before. But fortunately, I had already captured images of the moon in winter for personal use with my Blackmagic Cinema Camera in RAW format at 24 f/s. This shot gave us a starting point and determined the frame rate for the project.”

For his part, Ralph highlighted that "shooting the night shots with the bicycles was a challenge for the team due to lighting restrictions. To film the images, Tim placed the camera on the back of a moving vehicle with a portable lamp under it. When recording the time-lapse sequence seen in the video, Tim used the Cinema Camera to capture out-of-focus lights that he later used as an overlay effect on the image."

"We were very pleased with the camera's low-light performance, even at 800 ASA. I decided not to go over this value to avoid noise in the images, and then in post-production I increased the exposure a little more, about half a stop. The light from the streetlights gave a nice look to the street, but I highlighted this aspect even more in DaVinci Resolve," noted Buttner.

For the scenes with the dancers, Andrew asked Tim to look for lights that simulated car headlights. Tim quickly found the solution: he used the headlights of a real car. According to Tim, they were bright enough, and the camera worked so well in low-light environments that they were able to take the shots without using cinema lights.

Additionally, Tim used Blackmagic's Cinema Camera to film images of a wolf mask with glowing eyes that appears superimposed on certain scenes in the video. When filming, he used a green background which he later removed so he could apply the lighting effect inside the eyes of the mask.

"The quality that the camera offers made it so much easier to work with, especially the extra pixels of the 2.5K resolution when using a mask to achieve the glow-in-the-eye effect. Overall, I love using the Blackmagic Cinema Camera because the footage looks fantastic. It's extremely reasonably priced and allows for good low-light images, but for me its strong point is the 13 stops of dynamic range and the ability to shoot in RAW, which makes it possible to make any necessary adjustments during shooting. post-production,” acknowledges Tim Buttner.

Calibrations

During grading, Tim used VisionColor ImpulZ LUTs on some shots for reference and then highlighted various elements using DaVinci Resolve 11's Power Windows and color picker.

Tim admits that DaVinci Resolve 11 allowed him to "give the bike scenes a different look than the dancer shots. I was able to bring out more of the blue tones in the dancer images and contrast them with the reddish and orange tones in the bike sequences. Also, for these, I was asked to highlight the wolf's fur by making it more red and brownish, and it was great to be able to select that specific part of the image and use a Power Window to track the head."

On the other hand, this production frequently used the new content cloning tool included in the new version of Resolve. Tim was able to back up and save the camera's digital files using this innovative feature that allows you to copy the contents of different disks, memory cards and storage devices to different destinations simultaneously. I had two hard drives in the office, so I worked on one and made backups on the other. Once grading was complete, he exported the files for editing. At the client's request, the material was delivered through the BitMAX system in Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) format at 23.98 f/s and in 1920X1080 resolution.

Buttner points out that "color correction was done before editing. It's not the normal procedure, but it made sense in this case. DaVinci Resolve gave us complete control of the RAW images, and it was a real pleasure to be able to use such a powerful tool."