Date Night with DoTERRA

DoTERRA, the internationally-known essential oils company, recently had a video contest, where the participants were asked to submit videos of how they use their DoTERRA products, and here is the finished video:

Pre Production

Well, my wife and I were  with some friends at a baseball game when she had the idea of making it into a short, narrative style video about a couple who use DoTERRA products to get ready for a date that they're going on. That idea was bounced back and forth and went through many iterations before I actually sat down and wrote a script.

Does anyone know why scripts are always written in this font?? haha

Writing the script was an interesting exercise, because there was to be no dialogue in the film. It was just going to be our actors acting out their roles. The script went through many revisions as well, as you can imagine. At one point, the ending was completely different. Austin went in for the kiss and Diana slapped him, and when he woke up, he was on the floor of an empty theater. I felt that that ending left us with a negative feeling, as a sort of "bad ending", and I really wanted it to be a happy ending, so Austin ended up getting the girl in the end. 

Production

On our first day of shooting, we went to Water Gardens Cinema 6, who were nice enough to let us film (for free!!) before their business hours. Very special thanks goes out to those guys. They were very nice and easy to work with. Anyway, we filmed on one of their screens for about an hour and a half. I actually plugged my laptop into their Christie 2K Projector, and projected some footage that I had shot on my GH2 recently. It was so cool to see some of my work on a real movie screen! I think that that was one of the highlights of the whole shoot for me. The GH2 footage looked gorgeous on the big screen (and most of it was 720p that was upconverted to 1080p). 

GH2 footage looked great on the big screen!

Filming Austin & Diana while they watch their wedding video!

Part of the second day of shooting consisted of filming Austin playing Xbox and getting a text from Diana. These were just filmed in their apartment with Austin acting like he was playing Xbox. I recorded the sounds of the game later when I was playing Halo 4, and I just dropped the sound in on the timeline, and I think it worked out well! The sound of the phone going off was added later as well. I had the idea for the floating text from the BBC show 'Sherlock'. I love that show and I really liked how they show the text on the screen when someone in the show gets a message. I simply tracked Austin's phone in After Effects and made a new null object, and applied the tracking data to that null object. I then parented the text to the null, and vwalla! Instant tracked text! 

Another thing we shot on the second day was Austin getting ready for his date. In my opinion, this is one of the key sequences in the video, because it shows Austin actually using the DoTERRA products. I shot some of it handheld with the 24-70mm lens and then I got the cutaway shots with the 70-200mm zoom. I was standing all the way back in the bedroom and all the way zoomed in to get the money shot of him selecting which oil to use from the collection, so as to get the nice depth of field. This required a rack focus during the shot, so I think we had to do it a few times so that I could nail the focus. This is my favorite shot in the video.

We also shot the exterior of Diana's house that night. By the time we got there though, it was already pretty dark, and I didn't have any other lighting equipment with me, so I cranked the ISO up to 2500 and prayed it wouldn't be too noisy. To my surprise, when I was editing and looking at the footage, it looked pristine! I was amazed to see that there wasn't too much noise! There is a little bit of noise, but it looks very filmic and organic so it wasn't actually an issue in post.

Filming the door shot. 2500 ISO worked out great!

We filmed the exterior of the theater that night and nailed it in two takes.

Filming the exterior of the movie theater. Nailed it in two takes.

We did film some extra scenes that didn't end up making it into the video. One of the scenes that got cut was Austin pulling up to Diana's house and acting really nervous, so he pulled out some Lavender essential oil and took a few whiffs to calm himself down. I felt that this slowed the pacing of the video down too much, so it was cut out. The other scene that was cut was showing Diana getting ready for the date using her essential oils. The original idea was to intercut between Austin and Diana as they were both getting ready. I felt that that approach took the focus away from Austin, as he is the main character, and he's trying to impress the girl on their date, so that didn't make it into the video, either. 

One of the scenes that got cut: Diana getting ready for the date

Post Production (Sculpting with Marble)

Editing the video was fairly straight forward. Allow me to pause for a second and talk about editing in greater detail. I recently finished taking an Advanced Avid Editing class, in which we were required to read Walter Murch's famous book about editing, entitled "In the Blink of an Eye". I had read this previously (probably about 6 years ago now), but I didn't really get anything out of it back then. 

Anyway, one of Walter Murch’s many analogies that I found interesting was where he was discussing the differences between a KEMediting machine, and a Moviola (on page 45 in the book). He writes, “Other than the standing/sitting question, the differences between the Moviola system and the KEM system boil down to sculptural ones…” He goes on to compare editing on the two different systems to sculpting clay and sculpting marble. With the Moviola, he says, you start with nothing and then gradually build or sculpt the film as you would sculpt clay, piece by piece, until the finished film is before your eyes. With the KEM, all of the material is there in front of you, and Murch compares this to sculpting something out of marble. “The sculpture is already there, hidden within the stone, and you reveal it by taking away, rather than building it up piece by piece from nothing, as you would do with clay.” 

When I first read this, I had to stop and think about what he had just said, as I had never approached editing a film the way a sculptor would approach a block of marble. So, for this editing project, I took all of the footage that was shot and placed it in the timeline, and I just started chipping away at it until there was a finished product! It was a fun and different way of working than I had previously done before, and one that I am definitely going to experiment with more in the future.

You probably didn't notice the effects shot in the movie, did you? That's the way it's supposed to be though! The very last shot of the film, of Austin and Diana kissing with fireworks on the movie screen in the background, is the effects shot I'm talking about. On the day of the shoot, I didn't have any fireworks stock footage yet, and so what I did was to make a still frame in Photoshop with some tracking markers on it. In hindsight, it probably would have worked better if it was green, rather than white, so that it would have keyed out better, but I really didn't want to deal with the green-spill later. So I basically tracked the shot in After Effects and then applied that tracking data to a null object, and then made a garbage matte (one each for Austin and Diana), and rotoscoped around them for the duration of the shot. I then brought in the stock footage and parented that to the null object, so that it would move when the camera tilted up towards the screen. I then added the DoTERRA logo and parented that to the null as well. I added some grain as a finishing touch and vwalla! Money shot!

Below is an example of how it looked before and how it looked after.

Before

After

I purchased the royalty free music from premiumbeat.com, and the track worked perfectly with the feel that I was going for in this video.

Conclusion

All in all though, this video was a lot of fun to make. I love the process of trying to secure locations, and trying to align the stars so that everybody's schedules work out, and the filming and the outtakes, and the laughs, and the editing, and then looking at the final product and being proud of it! One of the main reasons why I love making movies is because of the experience that I have along the way. Yes, the final product is cool, but for me, it's really about the experiences I have along the way.

You'll notice that I didn't shoot in raw, or 4K, or have the most dynamic range, or have a kitted-out camera rig with lenses that cost more than my house, or matte-boxes with filters and wireless follow focus systems, or an external monitor for checking my focus. And the video still turned out great. At the end of the day it's about the story. Cameras and equipment are the tools you use to tell the story, and in my opinion, many of the doo-dads that camera companies are making nowadays are just eye-candy. Don't worry about all that extra stuff and just go out and make your movie. 

Huge thanks to Austin and Diana Gunn for helping me out and acting in the video for me, and thanks to Kristina Bills for taking the behind the scenes pictures and helping to critique the edit. Very special thanks to Water Gardens Cinema 6 in Pleasant Grove, UT, for letting us shoot there early on a Saturday morning, and thanks to Emily for letting us borrow her DoTERRA products!

More BTS pics:

Yeah yeah, I know: the theater is empty! haha

Alternate ending that wasn't used.

Getting a close up of Austin watching the movie.

Using my Steadicam for a shot that was ultimately cut from the film.

I wanted a really compressed foreground and background, so I used the 70-200 @ 200mm. Worked like a charm!