One of the first bigger projects I made. The idea was to create a music video with a bathtub in the middle of the forest. So I gathered anyone wanting to participate, gathered flowers and other props, and even rented gear like smoke machine.
The costumes themselves were not particularly cheap, I think in total I spend around 140€ on props dresses and all that good stuff. And personally, I think I overpaid a lot, while most of the props were cool from afar, they seemed to be made in a rush because imperfections and noticeable problems were pretty visible up close. For what I needed that day, it was fine, but you would like to have a prop more useful than form afar. But enough ranting, after a lot of driving back and forth, we found a spot in the forest.
And guess what? I had to bring that freaking bathtub here all alone, not only, drag it there, but fill it with water. And that was a painful task, believe me, but my driving force were the photos we’re going to take.
After a few hours of filming and photographic, our main model was tired and we had to pack our stuff. But the fact was simple, with all the planning, driving, and other shit, I had way less good shots that I wanted.
That’s a bummer, luckily, the other girls were having enough fun to just continue it. The plan was clear, take the smoke machine we had and go behind a shed in my home yard. Sure, behind a shed is not the best place for a music video, or maybe it is, but with the right lighting and enough darkness outside, there is no actual way to say where it was filmed outside or in a studio.
I think we spend another 4 hours setting up and filming different shots. But honestly, it was more of a Run And Gun approach, where we just did random things and tried getting something truly juicy. The thing that helped was the video style itself, I wanted it to be heavily stylized. And as the rule goes – if your shot is not so great, just add some filters on top and claimed that it’s an Artistic Expression.
Here is the video part of this project. Now I see that I might have used a bit too many filters and the randomness of the shots shows its ugly head. Now I would at least draft a basic script and shot list, and the most important thing, have a cohesive idea you want to portray. So enjoy…
Oh, and if you want a music video for your own song by any chance, just hit me up or visit WizardWork.Net, since I’m trying to improve my skills and give something for others in return.
Naturally, doing video leaves just a small time frame to take photos, and since we had even more things to take care of, sadly there are just a few photos that are good. The best advice, always have an assistant, some of these photos, which are great in my opinion, were taken by my girl while I was doing other things. It’s important for me to cover most of my bases, especially when you’re paying around 100€ for the costumes used…yeah, in a way it was fun but quite expensive.
Most of these expenses always fall on my bad planning, while you can think about a lot of things, you will always forget something. And the fewer volunteers you have the less money these mistakes will cost. For example, renting a diesel electricity generator to have a smoke machine in the forest, and then it doesn’t work, you don’t know why, and you’re in the middle of the goddamn forest. What I’m saying is, stick to what you know to minimize the cost of these projects. And here are the results...
Hope you liked this project, here is another projects and music videos I really liked making.
