‘Morning Snow’ by Christine Donaldson

Subject: Christine Donaldson
Filmers: Abe Kislevitz
Location: Mammoth Lakes, CA
Music: Christine Donaldson - "Morning Snow"

Christine wrote and recorded this song ‘Morning Snow’ earlier this year.  This is the 3rd music video I’ve shot and created for her.  This video ended up coming out a little differently than we expected just because we didn’t actually anticipate even making a video once all was said and done.  We filmed all of the content in this video one afternoon after skiing in Mammoth in about an hour.  We set out to get a few shots in the bag before we got a good morning with falling snow (to really hammer home the morning snow thing).  Well, if you are a snow person in California you’ll know we had the absolute worst snow season.  Christine and I were never together when it snowed after that initial filming session.  We kind of hung the idea of making a video on the wall for the time being and filmed her last video ‘Love Me Crazy’ out in SF.  Eventually the snow season wound down and Christine wanted to release the song anyway.

The night before she was going to release the song on her website I decided to dig into that initial folder of footage and tried to piece something together.  It actually felt very natural and I was digging how it played.  We sat together for an evening and hammered out the empty spots and had ourselves a new video! I was pretty stoked because on that initial film day Christine didn’t really want to sing the song, just wanted some slow-mo intro shots for the video.  I talked her into doing one run of the song on camera and it ended up being a beautiful shot and flawless all the way through. That one shot carries the piece and the rest was easy.  I grabbed a few old snow shots I filmed during the making of ‘Renegade’ and tossed them in.

This was all shot on the Canon 5D Mark III using the Canon 70-200mm F2.8 II lens along with the Canon 16-35mm F2.8.  Most of the b-roll shots were filmed at 720-60, while the one singing shot was filmed at 1080-24.  The video was edited in Premiere Pro CS6 natively, and was colored in Davinci Resolve with final tweaks and curves in After Effects.

Below are a few before (left) and after (right) color grading.  The camera gives awesome results straight off, so I didn’t do much.  I haven’t bothered shooting with CineStyle, just a flatter profile with minimal crunchiness or sharpening:

morningsnowgrades_5 morningsnowgrades_4 morningsnowgrades_3 morningsnowgrades_2 morningsnowgrades_1

And finally a few photos from the shoot:

Related

‘Renegade’ by Christine Donaldson

USC Ski & Snowboard – The Flashback

‘Love Me Crazy’ by Christine Donaldson