“Subzero alchemy climbing up the basement shisha bar chrome and its frosty liquid-filled cylinders, Calgary’s Divepool release their latest track, Hawaii, in session with Welcome to the West.”

Directed and Edited by Chad Tweten
Camera Operations by Richard Blais and (TheCameraStoreTV’s: Jordan Drake)
Photography by Kevin Kirkpatrick

How The Music Video Came Together 
By: Welcome to the West’s Chad Tweten:

Divepool is one of my favorite bands, so I was really excited to be able to do this shoot with them. The concept is pretty simple. With live sessions, you get what you see and location is everything. We scored an amazing venue, shooting in the basement of a shisha lounge; Fire N Ice, so I already knew we would have a great look.

In any partnership, especially creative ones, influence plays a big role in the process. I think this is especially true for bands. I wanted to play off that idea of influence visually by having each shot in the video have an element of foreground; where two or more members of the band are influencing each frame in the sequence. We spent a lot of time while the band was getting set up positioning the cameras just right. So we’re looking through Charles as we’re watching Mandy sing, you’re looking at Emelia but you have a part of Mandy’s shoulder obscuring the frame.

We were on a small budget, in fact, for crew and equipment there was no budget. I wanted to be able to make a really tight edit,  so I figured I’d need at least three cameras. After calling in some favours I was able to secure a Sony a7r II, a Sony FS7 and my (somewhat dated) Canon EOS 7D. We matched exposure, colour balance and ISO on the day. But since we were shooting in log whenever possible, the individual looks out of the camera were quite different. I relied heavily on Adobe Speed Grade to match up all the profiles and to achieve the final look we were going for.  The set was lit with the new, very powerful Wasp Par light for Hive Lighting.