The City is Exploding

music video for Zoey Van Goey...

After having a quick turnover to make (not a music video) but 'a video to play alongside the music' of Supermotion by Ben Butler and Mousepad, myself and Gavin were asked if we could make a music video for Glasgow based band Zoey Van Goey. We of course agreed having been very impressed with their live performance at the Arches.
Zoey van Goey are releasing their debut album and needed videos for all their tracks, we watched one that another student had made for Sweethearts in disguise, in which the female band member lives with a skeleton. Matt from Zoey Van Goey gave us a list of the tracks that still needed videos. It was really hard to choose one from the list because we really liked all the songs in very different ways! We decided on The City is Exploding, a lovely slow song with a folk sounding backing track.
Me & Gav listened to the song many times to see what we could do in term of a narrative. The lyrics were very provocative and we soon came up with a story of a girl from the grimy city who sells roses, the man she loves is equally trapped in the country and they both want to get back to one another. We made a small mood-board which we showed to Matt, he seemed very enthusiastic about the idea and intrigued to see what we'd come up with.The project took us much longer than usual because we had a long holiday, but we also had mountains of script work from Richard. Being apart when your trying to work on something is quite difficult, we had to communicate on email and hope that we were still both on the same page. Luckily we were and after changing the look of our puppets from paper cutouts to 3D models we had many nights of working with clay, paint (Gavin sewing mini clothes!) making background scenery.
We scheduled a weekend to shoot, we had the help of Steven as our DOP and Lynne from TPA for the smoke machine.Its obviously a lot easier to work with models than actors! We did however have maybe too many set-ups which made our time quite tight, but looking at the footage Im glad we got the amount of shots that we did, I think it needed it.
I loved having projects like this alongside the RSAMD work, it makes a change and it's great to be presenting work to people other than your tutors.
We have sent the video to the band and attended the Zoey Van Goey album launch (I love crossing things off my to do before Im 25 list and attending an album launch was definetly one of them!)

"...and the people here are nuts" 

-not literally though Gavin!