The idea for the music video involved going down to Brighton Beach and just wandering around, seeing what would happen. Yes, I know the featured song is in Hungarian and Brighton Beach is a Russian neighborhood, but you work with what you have.
At one point I was standing in front of a store pretending to read some Russian tabloid when a man sweating vodka approached. “Do you speak Russian?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then what the FUCK are you DOING here?”
Soon we became chummy and he introduced himself as Igor. I joined him on some kind of quest to find a bootleg DVD about Chechnya.
He found it, then we hugged tenderly and parted ways.
As for the bar scene… Duff’s was kind enough to let me shoot there on a Sunday afternoon. However, there was a very noisy refrigeration unit which screwed up all dialogue near the bar. I had to use SoundSoap to get rid of the background noise, but it couldn’t fully do it and the vocals sounded tinny. Still, SoundSoap is the best option for noise removal I have used.
Another problem. Despite the two lights I had, all of my shots were really dark. I spent a couple hours fooling around with the video filters in Final Cut Pro with no luck. Brightness, contrast all of it just made things more terrible.
But eventually I stumbled upon a magical solution. Go to Video Filters, then Image Control, then drag over the Levels filter onto your clip. All I did was turn the Gamma setting down to about 0.84 or 0.79 and it made the scene brighter without any loss of contrast, tint or any such side effects.
Danger Tally:
5. Seriously bruised from doing that fall from the bar over and over again.
6. Sore throat for the next day or two. Amy Van Doran was really choking me in the those scenes. She later told me that in the heat of the moment (Asia!), she channeled all of her frustration with men onto my poor neck.
chances, considering how there’s a lot of great stuff out there with bigger budgets and better production values. My favorite webisode series, 
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