Direct link: Vimeo / Youtube

We shot this Seremonia video in one day, it took about nine hours in total including a pizza break. VHS-Klubi brought in all the televisions and hooked them up. They had prepared the found footage on VHS tapes beforehand from links I’d given them. It actually took about the same amount of time to set up then it did to film the whole video. I had a very meticulous script and it was shot in sequence.

We used one 650 watt tungsten gelled to 5600 kelvin to backlight Diina’s bed. The televisions provided the rest of the light. The warm light aka. the rising sun in the window is a 2000W Arri tungsten light with no gels that the gaffer Anna-Mari Nousiainen operated by hand.

The video was shot in 2K, meaning it’s 2048 pixels in width instead of 1920 which is the Full HD standard. Height is the same at 1080. This is the difference between a common theatrical release aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and 16:9 that most flatscreen tv’s are nowadays. Here’s a bit more reading on aspect ratios if you’re into that sort of nerdy stuff. I actually think the small change felt significant and I think I will be using the 1.85:1 aspect ratio more in the future.

We also had a little social media campaign before the shoot. We created a Facebook profile for Tyhjyys Kasvoton and asked people to send dark, black pictures to him. A big thanks to everyone who sent their pictures!

There’s three references to popular culture in the video, but now that the it is done they turned out totally different to their sources of inspiration. So a note to myself, steal as much as you wan’t, you won’t be able to recreate it! But let me know if you think you got some of the references!

Directed, cinematography and edit by Sami Sänpäkkilä
Actor: Diina Bukareva
Vocalist: Noora Federley
Gaffer: Anna-Mari Nousiainen
Runner: Ville Pirinen
Analogue TV’s: VHS-Klubi / Tomi Leppänen, Juuso Ala-Kyyny
Thank you: Random Psÿcles, Erno Peltonen, Seremonia

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A promo shoot for the band Seremonia to coincide with the release of their third album Kristalliarkki. Shot with Sony A7s, Canon FD still lenses.

You can see the videos I’ve done for Seremonia here:
http://samisanpakkila.com/tag/seremonia/

Check out Seremonia here: https://www.facebook.com/Seremonia666

The post Seremonia Kristalliarkki promo photos appeared first on Sami Sänpäkkilä.

Direct link Youtube / Vimeo

Video was made with Seremonia, shot with Sony FS700 and Odyssey 7Q. Found footage from Internet Archive.

www.svartrecords.com
www.facebook.com/Seremonia666

The post Seremonia: Alfa ja Omega appeared first on Sami Sänpäkkilä.

The great finnish occult rock band Seremonia asked me to take a few photos of them. We wanted to do a black and white shoot and I decided it’d be fun to color the photos afterwords. I shot with my Canon F-1 and used Kodak TriX 400 asa film stock shot and developed as 1600 asa. Color was added by layering different colored papers on the pictures.

You can see the videos I’ve done for Seremonia here:
http://samisanpakkila.com/tag/seremonia/

Check out Seremonia here: https://www.facebook.com/Seremonia666

The post Seremonia promo shoot for new album “Ihminen” appeared first on Sami Sänpäkkilä.

Ville Pirinen is a hard rocking visual arts freelancer and a musician living in Tampere, Finland. He plays in a multitude of bands including Black Audio, Seremonia, Steel Mammoth and draws and writes comics such as “Ornette Birks Makkonen” and “Yhesti yhes paikas”.

Shot and edited by Sami Sänpäkkilä with Panasonic GH2, Zoom H4n, Audio Technica Lav, Swit led light and DFocus v2. Edited in Sony Vegas Pro 10. Watch previous episodes of A Day in the Mouth.

www.villepirinen.com
www.samisanpakkila.com

The post Ville Pirinen – A Day in the Mouth episode 6 appeared first on Sami Sänpäkkilä.

Directed, edited and shot by Sami Sänpäkkilä
Actors: Noora Federley, Ilkka Vekka, Ville Pirinen, Erno Taipale, Teemu Markkula, Ninni Luhtasaari

This is the second video I’ve shot for Seremonia. It’s from their newly released self titled album. This was a quick shot in between two longer more story driven music videos in the plans for Seremonia. First one was done already and is called Rock ‘n’ rollin maailma and it begins the story of a young girls driven to the world of rock ‘n’ roll and alcohol. Hopefully we get to shooting the third one some time this year.

Uhrijuhla was shot in a studio right after the bands promo photoshoot session. The idea is pretty simple. I’ll leave the loose red thread for yourselves to figure out. It took about four hours to shoot and two days to edit the video. Most of day two was trying to find the right look for the video.

Lighting

I used a 650W tungsten as front light and a 300W tungsten as backlight. I shot this one accidentally at 5600K although the lights are of course rated for 3200K. Sometimes you just screw up the most simple things. But it wasn’t a big issue since I had a plan to do the video black and white.

Grading the video

However after I got back to the edit and tried it out I didn’t find that it fit the footage that well. So after extensive messing around with the colors I got the heureka moment with Magic Bullet looks 2’s “two strip process” preset. I constructed the final look using the preset as the basis. I’ve actually tried this out on numerous of my projects but it’s never really worked. Lucky me it did this time around! Technicolor 2 strip process is a wonderfull looking and very complicated filming procedure. Here’s a bit of info on how they recreated the look digitally for Aviator. Check out the images on the website.

The visual effects are all done in camera except for the overlay images and one 7 frame shot that I did with After Effects. Can you guess which?

The post Seremonia: Uhrijuhla appeared first on Sami Sänpäkkilä.

I heard the first songs from Seremonia a few months ago and immeadiately fell in love with their music. I knew I had to make a music video for them! Gladly they accepted my proposal and we wrote the script with Ville Pirinen in just a few hours. The shoot took us only about ten hours. The edit one and a half days. So about a two day project in total. We didn’t have much of a budget and used all our own gear. Someone did pay for my pizza though so I guess you can’t say it was a totally zero budget!

Tanja Glad did the lights. We had one 800W redhead, two 650W Cinelight Tungstens and one 300W Cinelight tungsten. Cinelight is a company in Romania that makes cinema lights that look and work exactly like Arri lights but cost half as much. Our first impressions and tests confirm that they really are very good lights.

On the first indoor scenes I wanted to have a pretty flat daylight look so we just bounced an 800W redhead with a daylight gel off the ceiling. The window had a little bit of ND so I managed to pan from the railway to indoors without having to pull iris. Wich would’ve been impossible anyway cause I’m using canon FD lenses so they don’t have a smooth iris ring. Would be a smart idea to get them declicked.

On the rehearsal room scenes I wanted a really harsh direct light that would leave the corners of the room dark. We used the all the three Tungstens in their spot mode and put them as high as we could and just lit everything directly. It works great and those scenes I’m very pleased with. Those scenes were also shot with the SLR Magic 12mm f1.6 lens that I’m still getting accustomed to. A review will follow shortly! The glidecam shots we’re on a Glidecam HD-4000. I really love it so far! I’ve only used it on two shoots but it’s a great tool to be able to run with the camera and get rather steady shots.

Ohjaus: Sami Sänpäkkilä
Kuvaus ja editointi: Sami Sänpäkkilä
Käsikirjoitus: Ville Pirinen ja Sami Sänpäkkilä
Valaisija: Tanja Glad

Tyttö: Ninni Luhtasaari
Isä: Mikko Siltanen
Rokkarit: Ville Pirinen, Noora Federley, Ilkka Vekka, Erno Taipale, Teemu Markkula
Muusikot: Vilunki, Risto

Sävellys: Pirinen, Taipale, Vekka
Sanoitus: Vekka
Sovitus: Seremonia
Video ISRC: FI-4SP-12-00002

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