How it was made: Renegade (music video)
As part of a much larger project (Chloe Lowery's – The In-Between) one single in particular came with its own set of challenges. Renegade.
It became apparent to us that for this song, Chloe knew exactly what she wanted from a messaging standpoint but wasn't sure on how to execute on the messaging in a way that she would be happy with. Many calls were made, many meetings attended, and many concepts drawn up, and thrown straight into the trash.
With the clock ticking down, a tiny budget, and pre-production at a minimum. We said, why not put together a one take music video. You know, one of those videos where the camera moves through the scene and the action around changes as the talent walks from room to room.
"Ok cool. Let's do a one take!"
"But how do we make it less crap than every other one take out there?"
"Let's change the set behind the camera as the camera is moving!"
"Let's shoot it in a parking garage at night"
"Hell…yeah!!"
So here we are. In a parking garage at night.
With no budget for a Steadicam operator, we had to run with what we had and chose to use our own Ronin 2 gimbal. Not ideal for this type of shoot, but we had to make it work.
Since this was a local shoot, it was easy for us to find the right location. We already had the place in mind. Once the permits we signed we started to map out all the movements that needed to be made to pull this together.
Taylor (camera op) and I visited the location the day before to start drawing up some super high-tech sketches (see below) of what would be the motion of the camera, the movement of furniture, and most importantly the talents blocking i.e. when they needed to get behind the camera and hide!
At this point we had already discussed where we wanted to go from a story standpoint and agreed upon what scenarios were realistic and applicable to Chloe's experiences, so the logistics were the only thing left.
6pm arrived, and so did the cold. Once our talent arrived, I immediately started walking through the pacing with Chloe and Matt (Chloe's on-screen ex-boyfriend). Where Chloe needed to be at certain points in the song, when the camera was no longer on her, when Matt needed to drive the car into the scene, etc. All these fine details had to be perfect in order to pull this together. If Chloe was to run into the frame at the wrong point, it would throw off the pace of the entire piece. As you can imagine, it took a few takes to get just right!
Our skeleton crew all played a part in pulling this together. Chloe's HMU artist doubled as the bed vanishing artist/get away driver, Chloe's manager made chairs magically appear and disappear into thin air, we had people setting and breaking down full on dining experiences in a matter of seconds. It was a work of chart (chaos/art).
Here's a BTS clip of the moving pieces…and for a cheap laugh CLICK HERE for the perfect background song for this clip
All jokes aside, at the end of the day, we managed to pull together a video that really tells the message that Chloe wanted. That's the main point of all this. The thing about music videos is that there is no right or wrong way to interoperate a message, but there is such thing as not having an emotional connection with a story. That's something we wanted to avoid in this one and I we achieved just that.
Check out the final video below:
Adam Sewell February 12, 2019 Digital Spark StudiosHQ, Digital Spark