This is a music video I made for a friend in 2009. I wanted some more practice with depth-of-field tricks and volumetric lighting in 3ds max. Except for the people, everything is CGI, and the band gave me pretty much total creative freedom.

This project also gave me lots of practice with an HD solid-state workflow. All the live-action silhouettes were captured with a Panasonic HVX-200 using P2 memory cards instead of tape. This allowed me to shoot at variable framerates. I had the singer lip-sync at 2.5 times normal speed and recorded him at 720p overcranked to 60fps, with the camera mounted sideways so I'd have the maximum amount of resolution to key with.

These sorts of tricks are common in 35mm film workflows at a much higher cost, but it's only recently that I've had this sort of flexibility in a cheap video-only shoot. I pulled MXF data off the P2 cards, ran some keys in Combustion and then put out lossless PNG sequences of the alpha channel. With that I could "frame in post" for pretty much the whole video within the virtual set in 3ds max.