Troubleshooting

It's all in a day's work.

Shooting a music video is like building a house.

First comes the planning: What do you want it to look like? How do we achieve this? What is the budget?¹

The process can be as simple as a client saying, I want it to look like this movie. Or, I want it to look feel like this. Which is how straightforward the video for Suffer Club's Happy Now was when we prepped for it. Others, like with Thoughts and Prayers, Chris and I went back and forth over the storyline. I wanted to tell the best version of a story we could, before we ever talked about color palettes and look-books. Myself and the cinematographer on this shoot (who also happens to be Vinny’s brother) took a lot of the themes that Chris wanted to hit and molded it into the story that now accompanies the video.

Next, after you’ve figured out what you’re actually shooting (or building) you hire a crew that you trust to complete the job. Every project is different, though, so you need to hire the right guy for the right task. You wouldn’t hire an electrician to do a plumbers job in the same way that you wouldn’t hire a cinematographer to do a makeup artist’s job. Every person has a unique skillset and everyone is there to fulfill an ultimate purpose: the final product. It’s being a team player in the way that baseball players wish they could. For Thoughts and Prayers, our set design crew built an entire white room inside of a warehouse:

Crazy, right?

Then, comes the shooting: As opposed to the many months it takes to build a house, a music video generally takes a couple days. Two for a simple performance and narrative arc. One for just pure performance. Some, much larger budget music videos can take many days or up to a week, depending on how involved a story is, how many people, and so on. On Thoughts and Prayers, we were scheduled for two full days, but probably should’ve been three. The first day, we shot all of the narrative portions with the actors. It took much, much more time than I anticipated (it always does), so our eight to ten hour shoot turned into close to fifteen. It was way too long and I felt absolutely terrible for our actors. Fortunately, they were incredibly good sports about it. I couldn’t have done it without them!

They say filmmaking is basically just troubleshooting all day.

Imagine this: While building a house, you bring home interior doors that are an inch too tall for their frames. Oops. But, that’s all they had in stock. Now what? Well, you can either return them and wait for weeks on special-ordered doors. Or, you can take a saw and shave a half inch off the top and bottom of the door. Voilà. The door fits.²

On the second day of shooting, we realized pretty quickly that the blood spray wasn’t going to work like we’d anticipated. This was the absolute climax of the video and, arguably, the most important prop. Initially, we used a pressure tank spray gun, but the mist was so fine that it would never show up on camera. Seriously. You know how sometimes when it rains a super fine mist, it almost feels like you’re not even getting wet? It was like that. I could’ve been pulling hair out, I was so stressed out. But, after a trip to the hardware store, we ended up using two popcorn-ceiling spray guns for those thick, juicy globs. It was incredibly relieving in the moment, especially since we only had one take for the initial hit. After that the pure white room was toast. It felt like it was going to work! At the time, I couldn’t tell since I was in front of the camera. But, when I got the footage into my editing software, I realized the blood was barely there at all, even with most of the fat globs. It just sort of looked like the blood was slowly oozing out of our skin until we were all covered. So, after hours and hours of work later, no one knows that about 75% of the blood in that video is CGI. People hate on CGI but, when it’s done right, it’s a huge help. I know it single-handedly saved my ass.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make with all of this got away from me. So, I’ll just say this: This post, and it’s timing, will make much more sense down the road.

1. These days, generally speaking, no one wants to spend money on a music video that’s ultimately going to end up on YouTube. So, typically, you’re left trying to cut corners and get the best deals on equipment rentals and props. I suppose you can’t cut corners building a house. You know, for safety and all. But, I’m sure they figure out a way to do it.

2. I have no idea if this is actually possible. I’m not a contractor. But it works here for the purpose of the story, so back off.