With Murdo Mitchell’s music video for In Regret out of the way we started on Nav Sidhu’s video for his track Love Story. Nav’s video was fairly different to Murdo’s. Another language for a start and there was more of a story element to it. The track was also almost double the length, at about 5 and half minutes, so we needed to shoot plenty to keep the video interesting.
Instead of one location we had many; a flat which doubled as 2 different homes; some sneaky shots on a bus and the Glasgow Subway; several streets and shops in Glasgow city centre including Assams Indian Restaurant Assams Indian Restaurant on West Regent Street (they were great to let us in between lunch and dinner, the place smelt delicious); under a bridge; over a bridge; under another bridge (complete with funky grafitti) and finally the Tiger Style recording studio in Whiteinch. All worked into a neat one day 13 hour schedule.
We shot the whole thing at 50 frames per second allowing us to slow it down later to give us more footage to play with in the edit. I really like the look of suff shot at even 50fps, everything just looks so much more dramatic. Our film crew was also larger for this video with myself directing, Darren as director of photography ensuring everything was shiny looking and Stephen on B cam/jib shots. Mostly we shot with two cameras to get a mid and close up of each section at once.
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At each location we shot Nav singing. Sometimes the full track and sometimes just the parts which were specific to each location. We then pushed in single camera with some more fluid, moving handheld shots similar to the way I have shot nightclub videos in the past. Very intense, in your face shots with loads of movement which look great when slowed down. Each location also had some narrative shots, all adding up to tell the story of a guy meeting his girl to tell her all the things he wants to buy her.
A lot of my previous Night club event videography inspired the style of how we shot Nav’s Music Video
We had a new toy to play with in this video, an LED light panel. So far we have mainly been using redhead lights in our productions which look great but are hard to move fast as they need time to cool down before you can pack them away and have bulbs which sometimes like to blow. For this video we bought a large LED light panel which was a pleasure to use. The light quality was great and the light itself was really easy to move. We also had two smaller LED toplights which we used to fill and back light some of the shots. I think it’s safe to say we will be investing in a few more of these soon enough and hanging up the redheads for good.
I’m glad to say shoot went really well. As usual we fell slightly behind schedule at the start but were able to move a few afternoon scenes around and ended up finishing about an hour before planned. We did work through our break, though, so that makes it almost bang on schedule. Loosing the break was fairly painful considering our it was scheduled to be around the time of filming in Assams (again, it smelled very delicious). We did manage to wolf down some sandwiches on the move from one bridge to another though.
Nav’s video has had an initial edit and grade and is looking beautiful and Murdo’s video is finished and waiting for release. We filmed both fairly flat so we could push the saturation of in post so allowing colours really pop. Darren did some great work with both in but I’ll maybe let him explain himself another time.
We expect to be releasing Love Story ASAP and sitting on In Regret until it’s launch later in the summer.
Murdo will be playing a gig in the Glasgow Apple store later in the summer to mark the launch of he video and the single release on iTunes so stay tuned. Here’s a sneak peek for now.
