Nate Wind is a 23 year old man from Rochester, New York. He now lives in New York City. He does concert photography and writes concert reviews for a music blog called Play Too Much. He also does publicity videos for a major book publisher in NYC but today we are talking with him about his music videos. He recently made a music video with singer-songwriter Ryan Cassata and we wanted to hear all about it.
RTP: Can you tell us a little bit about the equipment you used for this video? What types of cameras did you use? How did you get the lighting so perfect?
NW: For this video, I had a pretty basic setup: I used a Canon Rebel t3i with 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm prime lenses, I had a travel tripod that I used for the short time lapse shots of Ryan spray painting the wall, and I edited the whole thing using Final Cut Pro X. As for lighting, we actually used construction flood lights. Ryan had one or two already in his basement or shed (I don’t remember which) and so I figured that would be good enough if we got creative. So we bought a couple more of those construction lights and I just bounced the light off of the walls and ceilings and whatever I could figure out. In the performance section of the video, I just wanted it to be bright and pop because, to me, that part should feel triumphant. In the darker sections, where Ryan is alone at the desk, I wanted to really accentuate the fact that he was alone and create the feeling of being kind of surrounded by a void. I thought the relatively harsh lighting that the construction lights gave to each of the scene seemed fitting for such an intense story as well.
RTP: How many hours or days did you spend creating this video?
NW: Ryan called me with a concept and we spent time sporadically figuring out what we wanted this video to be and what we could do to really drive home the point of the song. We shot this video in a day; total shoot time was probably 10 hours or so. Editing took several more hours over the course of a few weeks. I did most of the editing in the bedroom of a Brooklyn apartment that I was living in at the time, whenever I had time between the other jobs I was working.
RTP: What was your favorite part of making this video?
NW: It’s hard to say what my favorite part of the process was. I honestly really enjoyed making this video from start to finish. The whole thing was a lot of fun.
RTP: What was the hardest part about making this video?
NW: I think the most difficult part of making this video was trying to figure out the logistics of how to get the reverse spray paint section at the end to work. We only had one wall and only had one camera so we had to pre-plan A LOT and shoot everything completely out of order in order to make that work. If we messed anything up while shooting that part, we would have had to scrap that whole “Stay Awake” idea so there was some pressure there to get it right.
RTP: What was it like to work with Ryan Cassata?
NW: Ryan’s a really good dude. We were introduced through a mutual friend of ours after Ryan posted something on Facebook about looking for someone to make a video for him in New York. After our initial chat about the possibility of working together, I loved his enthusiasm and excitement about the creative process and about what we would be creating. He’s a fun person to work with. From a creative standpoint, he has a lot of ideas, and so do I, but everything is up for discussion. We collaborated well that way, by just bouncing ideas off of each other.
RTP: Can you share some of your other work with us?
NW: Yeah, I’d love to! You can find a lot of my work at my main website, http://www.natewind.com (I’m currently in the process of revamping it). While I do all of this video work, I also do a lot of music photography and NYC street photography too. So you’ll find both on most of my sites. I’m also really active on social media: on Twitter and Instagram I’m @natewind, my video/photography Facebook page is Nate Wind Creative, and my website is a Tumblr, so you can follow it on there!
These are two other music videos I’ve made in the last year or so as well:
RTP: How did you get started?
NW: And as far as how I got started: my friend and I started making videos for fun with my dad’s video camera when we were like 16. It just kind of evolved from there, and then I ended up going to school for it. I’ve also been really involved in music and the music industry ever since I was 15 or so, so by the time I got to college, I started making videos for my own bands and bands that my friends played in. Making music videos is so much fun for me because I get to work within the realm of music and video all at once.