All or Nothing

Music Video for the track “All or Nothing” by Valdez
Performed by Yolanda Lynes
Photographed, Edited and Directed by Andrew Gale

Since working with Yolanda Lynes on the shoot for Airship’s “Algebra”, we’ve been looking to do something together more dance focused. Recently I’ve purchased a couple of Nikon J1s, not a pro camera by any standard, but pretty decent for stills, and it has a fun slow-motion video feature. The 1200fps setting is unuseable, but 400fps, despite having a pretty low resolution, looks pretty good if it’s treated right. Most of the footage you see from the camera on youtube is fairly horrendous, this is because the files created are incredibly compressed (the minute long files it creates come in at 14mb), as such, if there is too much detail in the image, the whole thing falls apart. So we want to throw away the kit lens, and use an adapter so we can use some faster glass. With a shallow depth of field, and a neutral background, the image hold together pretty well, and I would describe the lower resolution as a ‘soft-look’ rather than the pixellated mess you would expect.

So we headed to the beach. The track we were using was from Valdez, and had a nice laid back feel to it that would suit the slow motion. So we found a nice empty part of Talacre Beach, attached a 100mm lens to an adapter I’d made at home, and Yoli did her thing (in the freezing cold – everyone else on the beach that day had at least two coats on and big warm boots).