Lau Nau Live Concert Film in the Orchard

A Lau Nau live performance commissioned by frameless series Munich. Recorded live in Westers October 17th 2020.

Directed and cinematographed by Sami Sänpäkkilä
Music by Lau Nau
Assistant Toni Laakso
Thank you Westers Garden

fonal.com
launau.com
frameless-muenchen.de

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Direct links: Vimeo / Youtube

The seventh episode in the series A Day in the Mouth features Lau Nau, the musical alias of Laura Naukkarinen – a singer-songwriter, composer, producer.

This episode took a while to put together as I first felt that I had not done justice to Laura’s amazing kindhearted person and her massive enthusiasm for music well enough while filming Laura and her family. It took an editor other than me to find that from the footage. This is the first time anyone edits my videos and I’m very excited that Eeva Tuomi was able to bring out what I was perhaps too close to able to see. Laura and myself have known each other for a long time and she is among one of my oldest “musical” friends. Especially in this case it was nice to see someone else juggle the questions of what to include and what to leave out.

This episode was filmed on two different cameras. A Sony FS700 was used on the sit down interviews and some of the outdoor low light shots. A Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera was used on all the handheld footage. It’s amazing how well the pocket camera grades. It’s much better then the FS700 with it’s low bit rate internal AVCHD codec. I was able to correct all the BMPCC shots exactly as I wished. You can see the quality difference clearly if you look at the sit down interview parts, the grade starts to fall apart.

Eeva edited on Premiere Pro and I did all the post work on Premiere as well. After transferring to Mac and Adobe Creative Cloud my editing and work has become a lot quicker and easier. There are some annoyances in the Adobe world and things I miss from Sony Vegas Pro but overall I can’t recommend it enough. If you have to provide files to anyone in the media industry it’s so much easier to work with Prores files.

Watch more episodes of A Day in the Mouth.

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Shooting the music video

This is a second video made to promote Lau Nau’s new album Valohiukkanen (Fonal, 2012). The idea was to go out on the lake with a smoke machine and capture something that had very little color information. Snow, hopefully not too bright blue sky and Laura dressed all in white! I wanted to accentuate the white by adding slight rainbow colors here and there with these new 6 inch prisms that I had just ordered via ebay. They’re made for educational purposes to teach how light scatters into a rainbow of colors. But if you put them in front of the lens you get all sorts of weird effects. You can see them scattering light in a few shots and I especially like how they bring about all sorts of cool aberrations into the image.

Aspect ratio

I began shooting the video at 16:9 ratio but on the edit table I realized that it looks ten times more majestic at 2.35:1 ratio. This kind of landscape is just screaming for widescreen. Of course I had to reframe a few shots because it was shot originally in 16:9 but there wasn’t a single shot that didn’t benefit from the aspect ratio change. There was a handy letterbox templates zip file available online made by E. Hartford but his website is offline. So just incase you’re looking I’m making it available here for download.

On the frozen lake with gear

We shot the video in one day. About five hours on the frozen lake and another hour in the studio to get the final shots of Laura eating the sun. That shot is a composition of a starry sky photo taken by Anna-Mari Nousiainen and Laura. Laura was lit with only the light bulb in her hand and a UV light behind her to simulate the stars faint blue glow.

The dress

The dress Laura is wearing on the shoot was propably the most time consuming piece on the video. It’s handmade and designed by Anne-Mari Pahkala. She works in Tampere and has her own company and I can highly recommend her talent and vision. Check out Anne-Mari’s website here: www.annemaripahkala.fi.

Here’s two 30 second teasers Anna-Mari Nousianen did at the shoot.

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Directed by Sami Sänpäkkilä
Cinematography by Timo Heinänen
Gaffer: Alpo Nummelin
Best boy: Anna-Mari Nousiainen
Stylist: Udi Salminen
Catering, runner: Ninni Luhtasaari

Order Lau Nau “Valohiukkanen” CD / LP / Digital

Kuoleman tappajan kuolema was relatively ambitious project taken into account I had very little budget for it. I ended up applying for some funding from ESEK that was succesful. This allowed us to rent a proper camera, hire a professional cinematographer Timo “Tinde” Heinänen and also buy some props. It’s been a while since my first video for Lau Nau released in 2008. That was one of the first shoots with my then brand new Sony EX1 camera. For this Lau Nau video we hired a Sony FS700 which I ended up buying for myself as well.

The script

First idea that came to my head months ago was to bury Laura in the ground. I begun the project by writing the script based on that simple idea. I had a pretty elaborate plan to shoot it outdoors but as time went by and the winter started creeping in I realised we just couldn’t do it. So I decided we do it indoors in a studio. This freed up a lot of the restrictions. I added the setting sun and the rising moon in to the script and generally made a very theatrical setting for the video. The final scene where Laura is reborn was added at quite the last-minute to the video. But as it was all gonna be very theatrical we didn’t have to bother with making it look real, just interesting.

Cinematography and lighting

Timo “Tinde” Heinänen who shot the video is a professor of cinematography at TAIK and has shot over 20 feature films. So he had the knack to be fast and get the light right in no time. Alpo who set up the lights and myself learned a whole lot on this shoot. Some of the lighting setups we wouldn’t have dared try ourselves. We had my Cinelights and a few reflectors, we had a projector that was playing back the sun and the moon backgrounds and we had my small LED camera light. The moon scenes with Laura look absolutely stunning and the only thing for light was two 350W tungstens. One as backlight and one was aimed to a styrofoam reflector that gave the main light for Laura.

Clothing and set design

Udi Salminen was in charge of clothing and props. Mine and her ideas about how the video should look immediately clicked so it was a pleasure to just leave a few aspects of the video in her talented hands. Anna-Mari Nousiainen who assisted Alpo was extremely helpful for the project. She’s the stand in for Laura in the rebirth scene and did most of the set’s actual building.

The grave was made from peat soil that we bought from Plantagen. Just one spider crawled out of it and that’s in the video too! The dried rusty colored fern, leaves and willow-herb we got from outskirts of the city. We stuck them on to pieces of styrofoam and covered the white parts with black cloth. Very simple setup. Hardest thing was actually finding a new battery for the pocket watch we used! Everything was already closed for that day. Claes Ohlsson to the rescue where Ninni managed to source one.

The shoot

The shoot took about 8 hours. We shot it almost chronologically except for the parts where Laura rises from the grave. Those were shot just before she changed into her “rebirth” costume. The video was a little difficult to edit due to the fact that the intro before the vocals start is quite short and the end part for the rebirth is quite long. I had envisioned and written the script as chronological. First Laura rises from the grave, then sings and then the rebirth happens. But that meant there was loads of stuff happening during the intro (master shot, soil beating, the clock etc.) and then the middle is just Laura singing.

I tried to cut it this way but the pace for beginning was too fast and then not much happening other than Laura singing. So I ended up intercutting the singing parts and the rise from the grave. It works much better like that although I do in general prefer videos where the narrative doesn’t jump around. The edit is a bit too musicvideoy for my taste as it is but the only way to make the rhythm of the edit work which I deemed more important. It IS a music video after all!

The image

The image from the Sony FS700 looks absolutely brilliant. There’s many many advantages to my previous camera GH2 that is my b-cam now. The look is cleaner, slightly softer but with more resolution an d more organic and film like. It’s very close to an ideal image for web delivery. It even hold’s up a little reframing and zooming in, something the GH2 didn’t handle at all. The dynamic ratio seems pretty good. So it’s definitely a big improvement over my previous gear so am very happy about that.

Something I need to investigate is finding suitable picture profiles for different shoothing conditions. As of now I’m not truly happy with any profiles. I’m hoping to find a good one for shooting in the dark and one for daylight shots with loads of light where overexposed areas are unavoidable. There’s also the much-lauded 240 and 480fps slow motion function that’s unsurpassed in this price range. We only used it in one or two shots in this video but I’ll be using it in the future for sure. If you’re interested in renting the camera just contact me.

Thanks to Timo, Alpo, Udi, Ansku and Ninni for doing a great work on the video!

The post Lau Nau: Kuoleman tappajan kuolema appeared first on Sami Sänpäkkilä.

Direct link: Vimeo / Youtube

From the Lau Nau album Nukkuu. Directed by Sami Sänpäkkilä.

Shot in Turku, Finland. Sony EX1 with Letus Extreme and Canon FD lenses.

fonal.com / launau.com

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