Blackmagic Cinema Camera and DaVinci Resolve Used on Owl City Wolf Bite Music Video

The music visualizer for Owl Citys latest track, Wolf Bite, was shot on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera (EF) and colour graded on DaVinci Resolve 11.

Following hits like Fireflies, Vanilla Twilight, and the Carly Rae Jepsen duet, Good Time, Owl Citys latest track, Wolf Bite, comes from the recently released Ultraviolet EP. Shot by Director of Photography Tim Buttner and directed by Andrew William Ralph, the video contains dramatic artistic elements, harsh and low lighting and a number of visual effects.

When I spoke with Andrew leading up to the video shoot, we talked about the look being pretty artistic and open, considering he was going to do some stylised animations over it, said Tim. The first thing he asked was for me to shoot the moon; however, the full moon had just passed. Luckily, I had shot a full moon in RAW over the winter on my Blackmagic Cinema Camera, at 24fps."

The videos nighttime bicycle shots proved to be challenging due to lighting restrictions. To get the footage, Tim sat with the camera on the back of a moving vehicle with a work light shooting out from underneath him. While recording the time lapse footage seen in the video, Tim used the Blackmagic Cinema Camera to capture out of focus lights to be used later in the video as an overlay effect.

We were happy that the Blackmagic Cinema Camera performed so well in low light even at 800 ASA, said Tim. I decided not to go above 800 ASA to ensure little to no noise, and in post I then pushed the exposure a bit more by roughly a half stop.

For the scenes with the dancers, Andrew asked Tim to find lights that could simulate car headlights for the scene. Tim quickly found a solution that worked: he used actual car headlights. According to Tim, they were bright enough and the camera was so good in low light situations that they were able to pull off the shots without any cinema lights.

During the grade, Tim used the VisionColor ImpulZ LUTs on a few shots as a base starting point, and then used the Power Windows and colour picker in DaVinci Resolve 11 to emphasise various elements.

DaVinci Resolve allowed us to give the bicycle sequences a distinct look compared to the dancers, said Tim. I was able to emphasise more blue tones in the dancers to contrast the red and orange tones of the bicycle sequence."

Tim also used Resolve 11s new media management duplication feature extensively. This allowed Tim to securely back up and save digital camera files through a clone tool that copies media drives, memory cards and camera packs to multiple destinations simultaneously. Once the grade was finished, he exported the files to be edited.

All the colour grading was done before editing, which isnt typical, but for this project it made the most sense, said Tim. DaVinci Resolve gave us so much control over the RAW images and it made life so easy to be able to use such a powerful tool.

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