Mind Museum "Rat Race" Music Video By: Daniel Peters

by jared1February 2^nd, 2011

Daniel Peters is always shooting music videos with HDSLR cameras. I asked him to send me a little info about his latest creation for the song “Rat Race” by: Mind Museum. He managed to pull this one off with a budget of about $650 US. Here is a little BTS info from the man himself. Thanks for sending!

“I sent many ideas and treatments to the band with great locations in mind, which we all loved…but unfortunately we couldn’t get it within budget.

The final idea was to use blank static TVs everywhere to represent some of the lyric content – ‘Try not to get stuck in the ratrace and don’t be afraid to be different’. So my vibe was…imagine if there were no bands, films etc and you had to create your own style, sound, look etc…start fresh, to let the creativity take you where it may, hence some of the opacity style shots of the singer.

After we knew this was going to be the treatment we shot the video at our studio Anemic Studios to save money … and to let us buy lots of old tvs!

the TV’s haha…oh the TV’s.

Because I wanted old style TV’s which turned out to be quite tricky to get hold of and since we didn’t get as many as I wanted we had to tighten the shot. I used a Canon 24mm 1.4 and Zeiss 50mm ZE 1.4 throughout. The Marshall Monitor helped me a lot but damn those AA’s… I really need to get hold of JAGs battery adapter for it. We had to refresh the tvs every couple of minutes because they kept shutting themselves off! Cameras used was the 5D MKII and the 1D MKIV…I love these cameras for everything, the price point, the quality, the low light and the frame rate. Yeah I would love the Alexa or EPIC but I think some people forget how spoilt we are sometimes with these DSLR’s…hell sometimes I forget it.

I locked down some shots with the Manfrotto 501 and handheld with the awesome Redrock Micro Mancam style rig, my follow focus for the day was a really really cheap indikit follow focus, can’t afford the Arri yet.

For additional lighting I used my brand new babies Datavision 600LED. Their normal look is pretty much the same as the 1×1 Litepanels …I want ninelights but I can’t afford them. So this is my secret.I bought black thick card and asked my fiance kindly to cut 4 holes the same size to be centre in the Datavisions. From far away they look like nice expensive lights…we had card left over so I said, ”how good are you at cutting out letters”? So we made two M’s for the band name ‘Mind Museum’.

I shot, cut, edited everything in 2 days. I used FCP.”