Film hurts my head

So I’ve been tinkering with film lately – and I find myself yet again attracted to the complex, the difficult, the troublesome!! My film experience thus far has involved shooting some theatre for various friends, and I’m about to do some short “video clip” style song/theatre numbers that I’m really quite excited about.

I’ve been mulling over ways to shoot music video clips, particularly the different ways I could combine still photography with moving images, and I’ve had some cool ideas I really want to try out (well, I think they’re cool – and of course they’re complex). I’m on delay though, I’m waiting for some equipment to arrive to help me make it happen!!

But in the interim I’ve been mulling over the problems of syncing audio and video – there appears to be 2 main approaches:

• Shoot as a single sequence – no syncing required if you just shoot the whole thing, wholus bolus, in one take!! This is my kind of shooting, lots of technical challenges and much less time in front of the computer editing; or
• Separate audio, and shoot multiple sequences (miming the audio) – this allows editing together the more traditional video clips we are used to and take for granted. It’s easy to do, and generally solves a bunch of problems (but niggles my “get it right in the camera” idealism)

Turns out I’m wrong – there are people out there who have even more complex aspirations than me, and achieve simple brilliance. Case in point – the new Diane Birch video clip for her latest single “Valentino” is definitely going to go viral, simply because the clip is beautifully simple until you check it out behind the scenes….

Seriously, watch the clip first, have a think about how you would solve all the challenges and shoot it, and then watch the BTS version. You won’t regret it!!