I remember when I got the call to work on this music video, I was excited but didn’t think much about it… yet. Then I started getting wind of what we needed to be prepping for that day. Vehicle mounted arm. remote gimbal, high frame rate camera, massive fog machine and air canons! Ohh yeah…things were getting interesting.

The State of The Secretary is a NC artist, this isn’t his first video, you should check him out on YouTube. His new song titled Astray was released back in June along with this video.

Turned out to be a total blast to shoot.

Producer, Griffin Davis had a vision for this running sequence and wanted the camera to pace along with our character as he attempts escape capture. The White Orange Gator was the perfect vehicle to get these running shots through the woods. As you can imagine, the path wasn’t the smoothest but between the dampening arm and the Movi XL mounted, everything turned out butter smooth. It took a lot of talented people to pull off this shot, I was just Gimbal/AC and B-Cam operator. Our artist was so pumped for his role, once in wardrobe he morphed into character. He was great and besides his acting skills you get to see his athleticism… the dude could run.

The large explosions are done in post, however we also fired air canons for most takes. Blending the two together really helped sell it. After Effects guru Caleb Brown handled those comps…

Council

The location was straight out of a movie…. probably because it’s actually the set of an actual movie in actual production. You catch a glimpse of some of the movie props like a blown up house and crashed War Bomber.

Be on the look out for another music video coming soon. Shot with this same set up.