Underground Planet is an award winning production company based in Austin Texas. From concept to completion we develop, plan, shoot and edit amazing videos for some of the most incredible bands and artist that a company like ours could ever hope to work with.

Black Tusk – Red Eyes, Black Skies

For this one I should warn ya that depending on your musical tastes you may want to turn your speakers wayyy up or wayyyy down (I turn em up). This vid came together pretty quick after a call from Director Kevin J Custer who was coming to town in three days to do a music video shoot with the band Black Tusk from Savannah who were here for a gig. He was going to direct and edit the piece but needed me to DP, dig up a location, light, equip and crew the shoot, not an easy task with so little notice but as ya can see we pulled it off. Kevin was great to colab with and he did a frikkin amazing job on edit. All the guys in Black Tusk were awesome and gave 110% each and every take.

This was shot on an EX1 with the trusty Letus35 Extreme.

Funny side note, about six months later I was asked to shoot some bands for Roxwel at Emo’s. Showed up for the gig while the bands were doing sound check and much like Norm on Cheers walked in the door and heard “RAY!”, Black Tusk just happened to be in town again and were on the bill. I’ll suppress my desire to break into a Disney song (“It’s a small world after all, it’s a small world after all …) but the happenstance of working with them again randomly was not lost on me. I’ll post a link to it once it goes live.

Here’s the link to the the Interview segment I shot and edited for Roxwel:

Black Tusk – Interview & Live Performance on Roxwel

And the other funny thing about the interview is the bit I included at the beginning where Athon is saying “Is the camera on? Is the f*cking camera on?” was him giving me sh*t (forgive the French) because while we were shooting the music vid,  just before we were supposed to take a break for pizza, we did an entire take, great shot down the neck of the guitar, looked awesome, Kevin called cut, band put down their instruments and I realized much to my horror that the camera must have still been rolling from the last shot so when I hit record at the beginning of this shot I had actually paused the camera and hadn’t recorded it. After fessing up and a good bit of ribbing from Kevin and the band we re-did the take and thankfully the pizza wasn’t too cold by the time they got to it.

Last but not least if ya started digging this band like I did you’ll wanna check out their live performance without the previous intercut interview:

Black Tusk – Live Performance on Roxwel

Teera – Flashy

Artist : Teera
Song : Flashy
Album: Untitled
Director: Raymond J. Schlogel
Production Company : Underground Planet

Well this one was a long time coming! Teera had hit me up  over a year ago about doing a video for her song “Flashy” though it never made it into production. Finally, about a month back, she hit me up again rededicated and refocused on her music. As this song pretty much demands choreography I turned once again to dancer/choreographer Carly Bell who did the choreography for Larissa Ness’s “Thoughts of You” and more recently made a second appearance in one of my other recent favs, Free Agent’s “I’m a Monster” . In short time she had tapped the three other amazing dancers, Marisa Mingea, Amanda Slick, (who were also both in Larissa Ness’s “Thoughts of You” music vid. and Alia Williams. Teera and the girls began practice and I began trying my hardest to think of a cool location that would lend itself well to this song. Knowing we were on a limited budget and didn’t have enough for a storyline the location had to be pretty spectacular.

Fast forward a couple weeks my crew and I were cruising around downtown picking up b-roll of various notable Austin spots. Had been a long day of shooting and had just finished telling them I think we have enough when I realized that we were near the Long Center and begrudgingly told the guys we needed to stop and get one more shot. As I describe it in the description of the test shot we got “As soon as we walked up the steps I near about dropped my jaw at the little disco stage installation.” It was just beyond perfect, I have no idea who’s bright idea it was to plunk down a dance stage right there but someone give that guy or gal a hug. The backdrop was incredible. I didn’t spend any time making the test shot perfect but if you’ve ever wanted to see me dance you can check out the test shot we did that night here, if you have any desire to see us be goofy, here it goes:

The rest is pretty much self-explanatory, great pop-song+beautiful charismatic singer+amazing location+hot girls+dancing+great crew+awesome camera=would have been hard to screw up this one.

In post I went completely crazy overboard with the glint and starburst filters but did very little, if any, color correction. For me those two effects took it to the next level and completely fit the theme of the song. Without doing the literal of the story arch due to a lack of budget I wanted to stress the whole “flashy” aspect of the song and provide an element that was strong enough eye candy that you overlook the fact that there’s no paparazzi nor any of the other numerous specific things mentioned in the lyrics. For me it’s kinda funny as I’ve never really cared for those two fx but in this particular vid I frikkin love em.

On a technical note, knowing that this was going to be an outdoor night shoot I finally bit the bullet on the nearly $900 Sony CBK-RGB01 Dual Link 444RGB Upgrade for my Sony F3 to enable me to shoot in S-Log. Though I recorded straight to the SXS card and didn’t get 4:4:4 with an external it still blew me away. As I already mentioned I really didn’t do much in the way of CC on this, the raw images themselves were stunning. The shots looked so good in fact that at times it almost looks like we faked the background and shot on greenscreen. The latitude between the highs and lows is markedly better, joyously better, and it made the upgrade worth every penny. That said I am still nothing but grateful that Sony dropped the price of the upgrade to around $900 as opposed to the 3 grand and change they had previously been selling it at. Edited in Sony Vegas.

As always huge thanks are due to my crew, Arturo Cavazos, Eliazar Mendoza, and Matt Friede for making my job so easy and Shane Mikeska for the great makeup!

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