Metric’s latest music video—”Dark Saturday”—should give pause to mobile moviemakers who hate vertical videos. Here, director Justin Broadbent used an iPhone X to shoot separate portrait-oriented videos for each of the four band members. He then combined the footage to capture how each character dealt with late-night loneliness. The result—which should please those who favor traditional framing—is a landscape-oriented movie consisting of four, side-by-side vertical videos.
Shot in just seven hours with a two-person crew, “Dark Saturday” demonstrates that guerrilla moviemaking isn’t just for amateurs. Metric is a world-class Canadian band currently on a major concert tour. In a fascinating Billboard interview, the director and band member Emily Haines talk about the positive aspects of video production on a shoestring budget. Topics covered include location scouting, scripting and synchronizing the four videos, and use of black-and-white imagery.
Creating split screen movies—whether combining horizontal or vertical video—is easy to do in post even with basic editing apps like iMovie. You can find many helpful tutorials such as this one by Eric Timmer and this one by BeautyBliss101
You can follow Justin Broadbent on his Twitter page and Metric on their Twitter page.
“Dark Saturday” has been chosen as a Mobile Movie of the Week by the editors of MobileMovieMaking.com.
Love this video