The amazingly talented director Rhett Dashwood has just wrapped post production on his video clip “Black Bones”, for a great band called Teenagersintokyo. The video clip looks amazing (it was shot on Vision Research’s Phantom high speed camera), however that’s the not the only reason I’m writing about it here.

Like a lot of low-budget productions – in fact any film production for that matter – this one had a lot of hurdles. For instance:

• A rouge pyro guy let off fireworks without a permit and blew off his hand meaning the council closed down all pyro for the first day of shooting.
• As a result of last years horrific fire season, the production team were worried about total fire bans – however, the day before the scheduled shoot, the weather turned bad and Melbourne had the biggest thunderstorm it has had in ten years!
• The production lost half of its crew due to re-scheduling.
• The director had a baby! (Congratulations Rhett!)
• Only days after shooting, the director found out two of the most important shots in the video clip were in fact corrupt (yes, as you guess, it was the most important explosion shot!).

However, despite all these major problems, the team got through it all… and the clip looks great.

I was personally only involved in the post production stages, and I must say I was tremendously impressed with Rhett’s courage, determination and sheer talent. When he found out that two of the most important shots of the clip were corrupt, and even the experts (i.e. the people who actually make the camera!) couldn’t fix the problem, he still bashed his way through and in the end worked his way around the problem. By actually opening up the CINE files in a HEX editor and manually copying the headers from one working CINE file to the broken CINE file, after a lot of trial and error he eventually got it working. Not bad work considering how many people told him they the clip was broken and couldn’t be fixed.

The point is, with all film-making ventures you need to think out-side-the-box, and just keep chipping away at problems. Rhett didn’t give up when things go too hard – as each problem presented itself, he and the rest of his talented team found a way around it.

This is why I love film-making… the people. The sheer determination to get things done.

Again, congratulations Rhett (Director), Ari Wegner (Cinematographer), The Butchery (Editing), Digital Pictures (Online/Grade) and Teenagersintokyo. You’ve done a beautiful job!

Black Bones from Rhett Dashwood on Vimeo.