Second in a series of Profiles on nominees for the upcoming MVPA Awards — being held May 16 in Los Angeles. DP Christopher Probst of the Sheldon Prosnit Agency is up for Best Cinematography thanks to his work on director Joseph Kahn's epic Muse video "Knights Of Cydonia."
Since this profile gets a tiny bit technical, a little background info may prove useful to those who aren't in the production industry. Keep in mind that this is a very basic breakdown of some very complex and involved processes: At best, I oversimplify. At worst, I mislead. Please accept my apologies.
For this web site — and for music videos, in general — the titles DP (short for Director Of Photography) and Cinematographer are essentially interchangeable: Both refer to the person responsible for the lighting and the filming. To overgeneralize even more, the DP is usually the person on set who knows how to position the lights and set-up the cameras so the footage matches the director's vision. You can learn more at the Wikipedia entry for Cinematographer. Telecine is the process by which the film is scanned and converted to video so it can be edited. The Colorist oversees that process, making sure the preliminary colors in the transfer are as intended. Read this Wikipedia entry on Color Grading for more details.
name: Christopher Probst
company: Sheldon Prosnit
job/title: Director Of Photography
First Video: The first video that I shot was for a German techno/metal band called Die Krupps. It was very low budget. We shot on 16mm in a dominatrix club in Los Angeles. Right around the same time I also worked on my first video with director Joseph Kahn, who had just moved to L.A. and was doing his first project here: A $5,000 rap video that we shot up in San Francisco. That video basically entailed me, Joseph and an AC [camera operator] running around with cameras like chickens with our heads cut off. Judging from our shooting style on projects such as the Muse "Knights of Cydonia" video that I've just been nominated for, not a lot has changed since then.
Strangest Video: Ironically enough, the Muse video is both the strangest video I've done — and highly entertaining because of that — and also a good qualifier for an odd shooting experience as well. The video was shot in two days in Bucharest, Romania. We had an excellent English producer, Richard Weager, produce the job out of HSI London and then it was just Joseph Kahn, me and my first AC Dan Ming from the States. The rest of the crew were local Romanian craftspeople and I'm not quite sure what they thought rolled into town when we got there and started running around like madmen with cameras in hand and all of these cowboys, horses, motorcycles, robots, ninjas, Barbarella-style hotties on unicorns packed into some extremely schlocky Spaghetti Western imagery. The track was over 6 minutes long — which is a tall order to fill — so from the word "Go" we never stopped rolling. It was great fun dredging up as many cheesy film references as we could come up with on the fly. Photographically, I tried my best to achieve a low budget, vintage look which can often be harder than one thinks to achieve with modern film stocks and lenses! I incorporated a more dated, Bonanza hard-lit lighting style and printed all of the negative onto low-con print stock that we proceeded to mess with even more with colorist Dave Hussey in the telecine.
What's Next: I just shot another video for Kelly Clarkson with Joseph Kahn and I'm about to do a Velvet Revolver video for director Dean Karr. That video should prove to be par-for-the-course since it features car chases, Spaghetti Western imagery, winged angels, guns, explosions, and of course, SLASH! God, I love my job!
