Shooting a Music Video of Layne Wrye by Brent Louis Miller

I shot this little video (and a second one that I am posting as another blog entry that follows) with my tiny 'flip video' just to give you a sense of what it was like on the set. The sound was terrible with the wind blowing--but remember, in a music video we aren't shooting for sound--everything is synched with the professional recording of the song.

Today I spent eleven hours shooting about 321 minutes of HD video for a 3 minute and forty-six second Country music video. Along with Tom Wooldridge and Andre Churchwell (my fellow students), I co-directed this music video under the supervision of our Music Video Instructor, Chris St. Croix.

Two weeks ago, for class we pitched treatment options to the artist. He really liked our ideas. The song is about a singer being late to a gig, while rushing to the gig, he gets chased by the sheriff. Country music videos tend to be very literal, so that the action in the video is tied to the lyrics. For example, Chris St. Croix said, “If the lyric says a guy walks into a bar and orders two beers, then the video will probably follow a guy into a bar and he’ll hoist two fingers at the bartender.”

In our video, the story we pitched was that Layne (the artist) was late to a gig and was chased by the police and has to lose the police on the way to the gig. He barely arrives on time to sing his song. We needed to shoot car chase scenes, and a performance scene next to a railroad track, as well as some short performances in front of a church.
While shooting the car chase, we got pulled over by an actual police officer! But all was well because we had a constable in our employ to maintain our safety standards.

We had a great crowd at NFI for the performance scene. I think NFI got some great exposure. People kept asking how many music videos I had made—and they were quite surprised to learn that including today—I had worked on one! And I had only been in school since July.

The whole experience was very enlightening about how music videos are produced. All the crew involved maintained a high degree of professionalism—with Tom, Andre and I all got a chance to direct—though all of us had a camera in our hands pretty much all day.

It was a lot of fun for everyone.

Now each of us has to tackle editing our own version of the footage to then present to the artist who will pick his favorite. To hear the song visit Layne's website at http://www.laynewrye.com/