Director Columbia Tatone recently completed work on a new music video for the band Pop Evil. The Colors Bleed video is “part
Matrix, part
Fight Club,” says the director, who also collaborated with the band on their
Waking Lions video.
Colors Bleed is set inside a secret lab, where men and women are being engineered to become fighting machines. Male and female mixed martial arts athletes engage in combat against one another, all under the watchful eye of lab technicians, who record and measure their performance.
Tatone says that while the project didn’t have a massive budget, she was able to put together a crew that was passionate about the concept and had a great love for the heavy metal band.
“The band came to me and wanted to do something powerful,” she recalls, adding that recent growth of the #MeToo movement inspired her to create a tale that called for equality.
The video was shot, in part, at an aeronautical museum in Compton, CA, where students learn rocket science in a fully-equipped facility. It was the perfect setting for the lab environment.
“It’s the real deal,” she says of the museum. “It’s an amazing location and the production value we acquired was great.”
Douglas Porter served as director of photography for the shoot, which also took place at Black House MMA, where the fight cage is located. Imagery was captured using an Arri Alexa.
Tatone collaborated with Porter on the edit, spending approximately two-and-a-half weeks developing a near-final cut.
“I would say it’s my favorite and least favorite part of post,” she says of the edit process. “I get to get deep into it and see things and tell a more-powerful story. But you also see where you missed things. It’s where story is put together.”
They used Adobe Premiere for the edit. In addition to the Alexa footage, a Sony A7S was used to capture the material that would appear as surveillance footage.
“I have never cut a scene where two people are fighting each other,” says Tatone. “When I got into it, I had so much fun making those sequences and selling those moments.”
Adobe After Effects was used for the screen graphics and for compositing. Mocha was used for tracking. DP Porter handled the VFX and DI. Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci software was used for the final color grade.