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Seeds: The process of making a music video Part 5...



Returning from a weeklong time-lapse shoot in Edinburgh to find the film shipment had arrived. Excellent.

I was wondering how that might turn out. Morco didn’t have as much stock as they thought they would. I thought I might have to scrounge the whole of the UK to come up with 150 rolls, but as it happens, Silverprint in London (my new best friends) had a ridiculous amount of Kodak stock to sell. I grabbed 100 rolls of Portra 400 and 50 rolls of Portra 160. (The unpredictable nature of the weather here had made me reconsider the idea of shooting all 400. There is a chance of being in full, raging sun with a couple of our locations, so I opted to be safe and cover myself with a bit of 160.) As long as I stick to a single stock per location, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Jack Quick from LomoLab, UK, has been most helpful in determining the post options that are best for the project. It turns out that their semi-automated process will produce a bigger, beefier file size and is also a bit less expensive. We’ll be getting DVD’s of the quicktime movies to edit with. I’m hoping to juice up my Macbook Pro before then, so I can handle the off-line edit myself. We may move the on-line edit to a post house in Glasgow for finishing and tweaks.

Kyle is currently working on the costume he’ll use for the film and getting the song ready. The slowed down broken up version will be on CD and played from a bog-standard portable CD player. Each take will be slated with the track number and take. Once in the edit, the tracks will be cut together with the slowed down version of the song, then the whole thing will be “brought up to speed” and further tweaked. (This is how it works in the perfect little fantasy world inside my brain, anyway…)

I’m working on trimming down the number of locations, as well as scheduling. We’ll shoot 2-3 locations per day (weather permitting), starting each day on the east side of the island and moving to the west side after lunch, to maximize our daylight.

We’re still considering several locations. The lighthouse is definitely going to be a prime location, as well as the St. Blanes Chapel ruin. There are a couple of locations above Scalpsie Bay that will be amazing as well.

We’ll be asking a favour of a boat owning friend of ours to shuttle us to the remote lighthouse location. That’ll save an hour-long cliffside hike. (Although, I’ve been considering certain points along the ciff-hike for locations, so maybe the boat takes us to the Lighthouse and we “shoot” our way back along the cliff…)

This is going to be exciting…

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