Hello everyone! I've been locked away for the past week in my studio working on my fave Australian band Ginger & The Ghost's debut album. We've finished the recording and now I'm back on Steemit to talk about how I shot and edited my first Benbrick music video for my song Forever Holding On.
Shooting a music video in Los Angeles
Being an independent musician means that if I want something done then I need to do it myself. In 2014 I visited Hollywood for the very first time. For some reason I ended up in a Target store. I had a brainwave in the GoPro section that I should make my own video.
I bought the GoPro, downloaded Final Cut, and sat down on the sofa of the AirBnb to try and figure it all out with no idea what I was doing!
Finding Locations
A couple of the scenes are from very close to where I was staying - for instance the intro is the water fountain/wall of Cedars Sinai Hospital. The white stairs are from the Leica Gallery across the road in West Hollywood.
I found myself spending day after day driving around searching for cool locations like The Getty, and The Sunken City. I'd set the camera up on long time lapse shots and then spend the whole night going through them. I was drawn to the colour palette of the LA sunset, and these sped up time lapses helped create a really cool mood. The pics below are the Hollywood hills, Santa Monica beach, and the lights at LACMA.
Forever Holding On
"I've got to stop this hoping
Cos my heart isn't coping with it
Without you, I'm blue
Tell me do you feel the same without me?"
Cos my heart isn't coping with it
Without you, I'm blue
Tell me do you feel the same without me?"
Forever Holding On is autobiographical - analysing all the conversations and situations that led to a breakup. BBC 6 Music called the EP "a heartbreakingly honest and modern take on the break up record."
I wanted the video to convey the feeling of melancholy.
I convinced a friend to be in the video to help tell the story. I experimented with shooting scenes with/without her & found an amazing free plugin called AB Source Strobe that would automatically flick between any two shots.
Airplane spotting and waterproof cameras
Although I didn't have a real overriding theme for the video, I really wanted to get some shots of airplanes leaving and arriving. My AirBnB host told me it was possible to get right under the flight path near LAX. I set up the camera for an hour pointing vertically up to get overhead shots.
I ended up using the shot as a transparent layer in the water scene (see the gif below). The camera was waterproof so I spent quite a few hours splashing about getting sunburnt in the Pacific Ocean.
Filming myself (in reverse)
As well as all the landscape shots there was a lot of miming to camera in different places. This was probably the most awkward part of shooting a video by yourself... because you look crazy.
One of the shots I did early on I'd transferred to my phone and onto Instagram which gave me the brainwave I could shoot the phone screen and then jump forward into the actual shot. This meant I could tie two scenes together. This probably makes no sense without watching the gif above!
Finishing Touches
I was filming on and off for about three weeks. There was lots of shots that didn't make the final cut. The actual editing and finishing of the video took almost a month too. One of the final things that helped tie a lot of the video together was transparent overlays like this one I filmed of a Philips light up against the studio wall..
Watch the finished video here
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