With this project, my group and I set out to make a music video for the song ‘Make it Forever’ by George Clanton. From the start, we knew that we wanted to make something abstract and almost psychedelic. However, we also wanted it to have an overarching narrative to give our audience a sense of direction throughout the video. We decided on having a character walk from one place to another, as some of our group members described listening to the song like taking a journey somewhere. To emphasize the dreamy feel, we thought the style could incorporate an extensive use of shallow depth of field, with the character surrounded by the bokeh of lights behind them. We ran into a slight snag when deciding how to convey an end to the journey, but eventually concluded that the character could meet someone. We developed that idea further and added another character who could also be walking throughout the city. The end would be their meeting.
Most of our problems came during production. It was difficult to have everyone involved in the project. We originally were going to have two units filming, one filming our male character, and the other filming the female. Out of our 8-person group, 2 were going to act; 2 were going to act as camera operators, including myself; and the other 4 were going to act as assistants. The day of production, however, we only had 5 people show up – our two actors, two assistants, and me. Since it was raining, we decided to only shoot with one camera, as we needed someone to hold an umbrella over the camera as I filmed. Filming was a challenge, as with abstract story lines it’s almost like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, having an open story line means there is a lot more freedom to what we filmed. We could just find cool shots as we went along and throw them together somehow in the edit. On the other hand, it also meant I had no idea what I wanted to film or what kind of shots would work best.
Once we were out and about filming in the city, I decided to have all the shots of the male character with him on the right side of the screen walking to the left, and I would do the reverse for the female character. I thought it would give a good visual contrast between them. I also attempted to get a variety of angles of both our actors as I had no idea what we were looking for. I knew we wanted pretty bokeh balls behind our subjects, so I did lots of closeups with them. I also looked for cool reflections in the street puddles and stark lighting conditions, such as with the table lit by the red light. Some of the locations we just happened to stumble upon, such as when the female character is walking through the passageway with the lights above her. While we were stopped and I was thinking what I wanted to film next, I happened to turn and be standing right in front of that passageway. Movement was also a key factor in the video for me. I took my lecture’s advice to always have some sort of movement to keep the energy alive, and I experimented with following the subject, having them stand still and moving the camera around them, or just looking for some sort of movement within the frame like with the reflections of water. I only wish I had some sort of stabilization rig for the camera. A dolly would’ve have been great, but too much of a hassle given the public spaces and rain, and the tripod shots felt too different from the natural feel that a hand-held shot gives. Setting up the tripod in the rain was also a hassle, but I appreciated that I could have a steady shot with it. I even carried the tripod with the camera on it for some moving shots, as it acted almost like a steadicam.
From this project, I learned how to get the most out of a single lens. We only used a 50mm lens for the entire video. It was a challenge for getting wider shots of our subjects, but it also allowed me to get extremely close to them and turn once recognizable features into abstractness. Plus, the lens could open up to f1.8, which was important for getting that shallow depth of field and bokeh backdrops.
Watch the music video below: