Freedom (the Beyoncé video)

This post is a couple days late so there's a good chance you've already seen the video, but now you get something to read about it!

You might have noticed that the video is on Vimeo instead of YouTube. And if you guessed it's because of the music, you are 100% right. The video prominently features "Freedom," arguably the best track on Beyoncé's new album, Lemonade, and apparently her record label has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to anything from the album being put on YouTube unofficially, so the second the video finished uploading I got the notice that it would be blocked worldwide.

But hey, that's why we have multiple online video platforms.

Anyway, this was something Kendra thought up a few months ago, I suspect largely because it would be an opportunity to make Matt look stupid onscreen (Kendra lives for those). I had been vaguely considering making some kind of fake athletics commercial based around the song anyway, since it's the first thing I put on every time I go for a run. Instead of writing a script, we just spent months discussing it and hammering out the concept and in particular the ending.

We shot the whole thing on a Sony RX100 IV, a tiny point and shoot camera that I didn't know existed until a few weeks ago. It can shoot up to 240 fps at 1080p in sLog2. If you're a video nerd, you know how impressive that is. If you're not, that was probably just gibberish. Anyway, I rented the camera, shot this whole video (plus part of next week's massive video), and am pretty thrilled with how it turned out, even if the natural light wasn't always as perfect as I would've liked (a minor quibble).

That just about covers it. If you like the video, please share it. Since this doesn't fit into our usual nerd/movie/comic categories, I'm not sure where/who to send it to get press or exposure, so anything that will get more people watching it is great.

And seriously, next week's video is huge. We've been working on it since June and I'm very excited about it.

Patrick