The Making of, Budada – ‘She Ain’t Blue’ Music Video.

Making this video was a LOT of fun. We had as many engineering challenges as we did visual challenges!

We originally went to Budada with three ideas, all of them creative, weird and set to compliment their music style and EP Artwork.

The band then came back to us having picked quite easily the hardest out of the bunch. The idea was to hang the band upside down, throw cake, glitter, water and whatever else we could find at them whilst we exploded paint bombs on them. All of these things were to give a sense of anti-gravity, because, when we came to the editing process we would flip them back round the right way so that everything fell upwards, along with hair, mic leads and everything else.

This gave us some pretty big challenges

-How do we hang them from their feet safely?

– How do we keep their clothes hanging in the right direction?

-How long can they stay upside down safely without passing out?

-Where can we find space to create a structure for them to hang off?

-Do we shoot them on green screen so we can even more freedom editing?

Those were just the pressing questions that needed answering, a million other health & safety, visual, technological and mechanical questions needed answering and the whole idea started becoming quite behemoth.

But one by one every single thing started fitting into place. A normal studio for example just wouldn’t cut it as we needed to be very messy and very high up, so we went to the band and asked if they knew anyone and who happened to rent a warehouse 15 minutes down the road? The Guitarist; Marcel.

When we went to scout the warehouse we were still undecided on how to suspend the band, so when we arrived at said warehouse and found a forklift truck the answer hit us like a lightning bolt, the answer was two straps on one of the forks, gravity boots (the ones you would use at the gym for inverted sit ups) and to raise the forks with the bands feet attached. This meant very little effort for the band (meaning we could shoot for longer), safe and easy ascending and descending and brilliant maneuverability! Sorted! Suddenly everything had gone from being up in the air and on the brink of failure to everything in its place and ready to shoot. It doesn’t happen like that very often!

It was then a question of sourcing the materials for as cheaply as possible, as the budget was starting to run very low by this point and Glitter, Paint and other sparkly objects do not come cheap on the internet! This is where our local scrap store came in. Scrap stores are amazing, they take all the empties, cut outs, throw aways and waste from factories and other manufacturing plants and sell it all on. You can fill a great big bag full of the most useful little things for just £12, an ideal place for us to source our sparkly glitter and random objects! And they had everything, glittery circles, sparkly cut outs, puzzle pieces, fake snow, they even had a selection of the most ideal crash mats and some perfect lighting gels (that usually cost an absolute bomb). Once again, everything fell into place and the shoot was a go!

It’s one of those things, everything went from being so dramatic and undecided to being so perfectly sorted that by the time we came to shoot we were able to nail the whole thing in a single weekend, everything ran like clock work and because of that, its a happily uninteresting story for the shoot itself, but that’s the beauty of forethought and meticulous planning.

We loved it, the band did an amazing job considering the abuse we put them through and they nailed pretty much every take! A highly professional and incredible sounding band with what we would consider a pretty damn cool video!

Thanks to everyone involved!

Budada for being so enthusiastic and happy to stick with such a hair brained idea

Marcel for hooking us up with the Warehouse and Forklift

Lance for keeping us laughing

Jake for some incredible inverted drumming skills

Louise who got stained blue for a good few days afterwards and did an amazing job of performing upside down

Lewis for being brilliant fixer and agent, keeping everything running smoothly

and Fin engineered everything perfectly and did an amazing job to build the set

 

We loved this one and cant wait for the next project!

 

Jack @Friction Multi Media