SANTA MONICA, CA — Creative studio Timber (www.timber.net) recently helped heat things up between recording artists Shawn Mendes & Camila Cabello in their new music video, Señorita for Island Records. The team at Timber, lead by creative directors/partners Jonah Hall and Kevin Lau, worked closely with director Dave Meyers and production company Freenjoy to complete all VFX and post production for the video — a whimsical love story with a playful tone that showcases Mendes and Cabello in intimate montages and dynamically-stylized backdrops.
“Director Dave Meyers really wanted to base it all on the idea of a fashion shoot,” explains Lau. “Most of the references we were all looking at was fashion photography for print. The overall tone of the music video was to be lush and cinematic to create a beautiful foundation for onscreen romance.”
The production was mostly shot on the Alexa LF to get the desired range and achieve the cinematic fashion nature of the photography, and the Panasonic LT s35 for low-light situations. From there, the files moved into post, following a fairly traditional digital workflow. “As the video was being shot, the DIT would be offloading and transcoding files on-set,” says Lau. Because of the original, super-condensed eight-day schedule, editor Alyssa Oh was requested on-set. From there, she started “piecing things together as soon as scenes were wrapped,” says Lau. Due to final approvals, the schedule was extended by about a week which, Lau says “was nice but still a bit condensed. “With the current digital workflows, we have the luxury of getting a jump on the post production before they even wrap camera. Once the shoot was wrapped, full-resolution drives were sent to Timber and to Company 3, who handled the telecine.”
The video was cut on an Avid at Rock Paper Scissors by Oh, while color was handled by Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3 on Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve. Timber provided creative direction, set supervision, design, post, visual effects and finishing.
“We always try to jam a lot of ideas into a short amount of time, but that's what makes them fun too,” adds Lau. “Music videos are one of the last really creative mediums where you get to experiment more than with a commercial project. In the end, the music video looks amazing and got over 100 million views in the first week, so we're glad it got the extra time to really polish it up.”