Part one of a series of posts about making a music video.
I’ve decided to write a series of posts about my newest project, a video for We Are Hex’s “Bottom of My Belly” from their record “Gloom Boom.” I’m fortunate to be collaborating with talented folks from Larry Ladig Photography, Hi Def Pics, and Birkhead Editorial.
From the band’s website: “We Are Hex is a messy pile of pop slop… booming keyboards, precise and spaced out guitar, blown out bass, led by a barrage of drums . The rhythmic vocals pace themselves with the kick, conveying sex and sadness. The lyrics are deceptively self-aware in their simplicity.”
The record is crazy good, and I highly recommend you get it from their BandCamp site.
How I Found Myself Accidentally Doing What I’d always wanted to Do
I’ve always loved music, and I’ve always loved music videos. I didn’t have MTV growing up, but we had VH1, and many an afternoon was spent watching Phil Collins videos. My foray into creating music videos, however, started with my own band, Thin Fevers. In the spring of 2008, for some reason we decided we needed to enter a music video contest, so we ended up with this simple, but great video for “Idiot Archipelago.” Part “Take On Me” and part “Godzilla,” it was a lot of fun, and we shot and cut it in a very long, hot day.
After that I found myself doing some live work with Jookabox, and that landed me a quick gig making another video for the (at the time) solo artist.
These project were great, especially great considering their “we have a camera and some lights, lets screw around” approach. For “Bottom of My Belly” I’ve approached the project very deliberately, planning, story-boarding, and collaborating. I have no desire to pigeonhole myself, so I’ve been spending a lot time with graph paper and a little time with Final Cut Pro to get a sketch going.
In my next post I will be sharing some of my storyboards and talking about how I’ve dove into this project. I’d love to hear feedback on these pieces in the comments and find out if there any specifics people reading may want to know. This is going to be an exciting project, and something that I think will end up being a really cool piece of work.