I traveled to South Africa for a few shoots at the end of 2009 and one of them included working with the amazing guys of Zebra and Giraffe. I have worked with these guys a few times since they started their project together and it’s always a pleasure.
The concept was purely to get the guys in the water at my parents vacation house and shoot with them up close to make sure that they look powerful but “cool”. I shot with my Nikon D3, Nikon F90x on 35mm and my beautiful Yashica 124g on 120 film. It’s been an absolute nightmare with the 120 as Jessops sent them away to the Prolab and completely messed up the scans (after 5 weeks) and have now taken them back to rescan so I haven’t got them back yet but the Digital and 35mm are done and came out quite rad.
This video was filmed and edited by their guitarist, Alan Shenton, on his iPhone 3GS which is amazing. Technology really is great.
At the end of 2008 I worked with Zebra and Giraffe on their music video for their single at the time which was Oxymoron. One of the member, Alan Shenton, also runs a video company (www.melonvideos.co.za) and the two of us came up with a stupid idea of shooting the video on a Nikon D3 as stills so that we could create a “higher than Full HD” resolution video that would be “jumpy” to suit the style of the single. At the time we tried to do a bunch of research but we hadn’t seen any one else doing this so we didn’t have much to work with which made us run a lot of tests to see if it was possible. We eventually came up with something that we thought worked so we began planning a full day that worked for everyone involved to shoot everything.
The video was photographed by myself at 5 and 10 frames per second using the Nikon D3 DSLR and then the 39 000+ photographs were narrowed down and about 15 000 of these were individually graded and then edited at Melon Videos. I need to also point out that the Nikon D3 at the time could only shoot sequences up to 130 frames at a time so it forced us to log after each 13 seconds of footage. As you can imagine it was a nightmare syncing all the footage but we feel we got it right.
This was one of my most exciting projects to work on because of the people that I worked with. It was hard and I don’t think I would do something like this again in a hurry with no budget. Since this Nikon has launched the D3s which can film in HD and it would have been fun to explore that at the same time. Possibly another project in the near future?!
When watching this PLEASE MAKE SURE to watch it in as high resolution as you can as YouTube compresses the video for speed and you wont get the best quality experience.
Produced by Melon Videos. Directed & edited by Alan Shenton. Co-directed by Marcus Maschwitz & Greg Carlin. D.O.P – Marcus Maschwitz. Art Direction by Greg Carlin & Alan Shenton. Grading by Sarah Shenton & Marcus Maschwitz. Makeup by Talana Torre.
