Music video production breakdown of Jetta’s “Honey” – multiple locations! Rain indoors! 15k projector, and more!
Jetta came to us with the idea firmly in mind for her music video production – a gorgeous old building, a spiral staircase – and most importantly of all – rain indoors.
Finding a beautiful old building wasn’t a problem, this is Britain after all, we’re drowning in old buildings. However, finding one that would let us flood the place… that’s another story altogether.
Obviously our first question was could we do snow instead of rain?
At least fake snow can be swept/vacuumed up (mostly). But despite talking it out, Jetta was certain to get the right vibe for the music video, it needed to be rain. So, as always, we worked out a solution. It was going to be stunning, evocative imagery, and we weren’t going to pass up the chance to play!
We got the building with the spiral staircase locked down pretty easily – and obviously they weren’t in the mood to have us rain on their lauded architecture – but fortunately we’ve got a massive 15K lumen projector… So we set about building a massive 9x9x9m waterproof setup for the rain, stuck the projector on a scaffolding tower overhead, and projected the background of the old building behind the set.
With that worked out, we brought our trusty rain machine out, and proceeded to soak Jetta through maybe 10 times over to get all the shots we needed for the raining section.
With that locked down, we proceeded to shoot the opening sections, with a projected background once again, and the silhouettes.
By then, night was falling, so we embarked to the old building, and lit from the outside with a bunch of 2Ks with CTB on double wind-ups and rigs at various heights to get some moonlit vibes coming through the windows. We also discovered there were stained glass bees on the windows… which seemed wholly appropriate for a track entitled Honey.
We considered using our drone for the shot down the spiral staircase – but it was inevitably going to blow Jetta’s hair everywhere, and wouldn’t look right, so we built a pulley system at the top of the staircase and attached the camera to it, hoisting it up and down the ~30m stairwell to get the gorgeous shots of her walking around the atrium at the bottom.
With the building wrapped, we packed down and moved on to our final location, shooting in a park at the dead of night. With our trusty battery-powered fresnels, we had plenty of light to work with, and between the location and the tilt-shift lens we shot on, it has an effervescent, magical feeling, that Jetta wanted from the off.
The brief was to have a super-soft, dreamlike quality to the whole video – and it feels like that’s what we got by the time we were done with the edit a few days later.
When we had the final cut approved, there were a couple of skin blemishes that Jetta felt needed to be removed – but as we do all our VFX in-house, that was no problem whatsoever, and the final video was delivered to the label just as she wanted it.
Review in Clash Magazine
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