On the day of writing this Google went to the trouble of showing me one of my own photos and thereby let me know that it’s exactly 4 years since Chris McShane and I began filming our video for the McShane & Shaw song Your Car’s Too Big.
The following tale goes to show that pretty much anyone with the most basic equipment can get involved in movie making and still come out with a surprisingly decent product.
Also, my new book Wings Are Handy Things is now available to buy. Depending on your country you should be able to find a link below to get the book either for yourself or someone else.
In our heads the making of a music video seemed a laughably simple objective. The song was already recorded. “In the can” as we film producers like to say. All we needed to do was capture some video imagery to go with it.
We drove off in search of a location, carrying changes of clothes and various objects we thought might come in useful: a sopranino ukulele, an oversized hip flask inscribed with the words Big Tipple, a camping stove, a kettle and a shower head with hose attachment (this last item, left over from some bathroom renovation, did a lot of visual heavy lifting for us by the end). In terms of film-making gear we had a Bluetooth speaker (through which to play the song) and a camera tripod which held my phone to do all the filming.
We thought the obvious place to go was our local supermarket car park where I’d first been inspired to write the song. The parking spaces there are designed for what I would call “normal” size cars. When people buy a big American-style car here in the UK they don’t seem to think about exactly where they will be driving it, as in, the UK. This country is both small and old. Roads are narrow, having been originally designed for horses and carts, and land is at a premium so that car parks (called parking lots in the USA) are much smaller and harder to negotiate than those you’d find in North America for which these large vehicles were intended.
The supermarket car park often has cars that are so long they protrude a couple of feet from the end of a parking stall. Or, they are so wide that the occupants can barely open their doors without banging into whatever is on either side. As for driving these behemoths, I’ve seen nervous people take 15 minutes to extricate their vehicle from a spot. So, we headed straight there hoping to get pictures of some of these monster cars. But on arrival, we discovered this plan was a non-starter. Sooner or later, we would upset people who might not want their huge cars appearing in a such a video. Some of them might be friends, neighbours and countless country folk who had access to tractors, shovels and pitch forks and might easily hunt us down if they chose to do so.
Next plan, we drove off and parked up at Hartcliffe, a lovely bleak area of farm and moorland not completely dissimilar to Wuthering Heights. Getting out of the car we were soon cold and windblown with a tripod that kept blowing over. Our experience so far helped us hone in on the sort of location we wanted:
1) away from prying eyes and other people’s cars.
2) interesting and well lit (but had to be outdoors as we had no lighting)
3) out of the wind.
Chris suggested we try his allotment. We went there and changed from our suits into clothes more suitable for country bumpkin types. Using Chris’s shed as our background I clipped my phone onto the tripod and made sure we were nicely in frame. We raided the surrounding garden to find various objects such as hammers, rakes and sieves to play with. Then Chris played the song as I pressed Record before hurrying to join him in-frame. After each improvised take, we viewed our results to see what worked and what didn’t. We discussed things to try for successive takes.
In a corner of the allotment, I’d found some large plastic water containers. Two were broken but one was fully intact. It was apparent that the plastic was brittle with age and would easily shatter like those fake glass bottles in Hollywood bar fights. I instructed Chris to hit me on the head with the intact bottle. But, to make it effective, he needed to give me a proper whack.
“Don’t hold back,” I said.
“I won’t,” he said.
By then I’d been getting quite bossy so I think he was more than happy to oblige.
We did about five takes in total before we felt we had enough material for editing. But viewing the footage at home I realised the camera had been auto-focusing with every gust of wind and change of light. It was full of glitches. We would need to go back out to the allotment and do it all again, this time with the camera set on manual focus.
A week later the weather was sunny and perfect and we were back filming at the allotment. Looking at the results from this session however, we had to agree that, although the picture was improved, the early stuff was still better. Our performance on the first day, when we were spontaneously inventing our actions, came across as fresher and funnier. Another problem was that the sunny day had created distinct shadows and meant this footage could not be edited into our earlier work that was shot under an overcast sky.
We decided to get some new shots in a different location. Thinking about it more it seemed a good idea to include in our video, about a car, an actual car. A friend called David owned an early version of a 1960’s Mini Cooper. It is the most cute and archetypal of British vehicles. David and his wife Marie allowed us to film the car but not to drive it. They also kindly let us use the front of their eighteenth-century farmhouse as a backdrop. Chris and I showed up with suits and props to film some more antics.
Our approach had become slightly more nuanced than with the allotment sessions. Instead of running the song from beginning to end for each and every take, we now grabbed bits of bite-size video to match sections of song.
While we continued with the “no cameraman” technique, of pressing Record on a phone and running into frame, we found other ways to become more varied in our approach. We moved the tripod to different spots to give us varied camera angles and to take advantage of changing light as the sun moved across the sky.
We filmed everything we could think of filming that might somehow help the video. As our inspiration for ideas dwindled, we invented some silly impromptu dance moves. These poor man’s versions of Riverdance choreography were a last resort but added a lot of fun to the final piece.
At first, we couldn’t think how to use these dance sequences, as they went on for too long. But in the editing process someone had the whacky idea of speeding them up to make them fit. This was a hilarious solution and is a great example of how creativity in the editing process can often make up for shortfalls in the filming.
See the video on youtube here
Next time I will talk about the joy of video editing; a task that turned out to be far more fun and creative than I ever imagined.