"Somewhere" Video
It took a long time but the video for John Shannon’s “Somewhere” song that I shot for Obliqsound in May is finally on youtube.
After me shooting hours of John walking through nature while I was walking backwards with a boom box strapped to me to enable him to lip sync his vocals and after a long and strenuous editing process we settled on a very simple version.
In the afternoon of the last shooting day John and I went back to a field of grass that we had scouted on day one of the shoot. Both of us were totally burned out after days of getting up at 5 AM, working 12 to 14 hour days and then still having to copy the footage to hard drives and having to back it up. We survived on 3 to 4 hours of sleep per day. Both of us had given all we had. This was it! A few more hours and we would be done shooting.
When we got back to the field of grass the conditions were almost perfect. The sun was still a little high but there was the perfect amount of wind that moved the grass beautifully. John sat down and unpacked his guitar. I was looking for a camera angle that would not show any infrastructure since the idea for the video was to show John in unspoilt nature. I locked the camera down on a tripod framed the shot, got iPod and amplifier ready to play the song for John to lip sync.
I counted him in because “Somewhere” has an abrupt beginning. Three……two…..one…… I hit play. It was a magical experience. John played the guitar and at the same time lip-synced perfectly. It was also amazing that the wind slowed down on quiet parts of the song and picked up when the song picked up speed. It felt like we were in sync with the universe. After the first take I already used a word that I rarely use but that was frequently used by my friend Klaus. “Fantastic !!!” is all I could say. Right away we did a second take.
I had shot more then five hours of footage but all I needed at the end where nine minuets that I shot in the grass. I did two more “close-up” takes of the song then I said “I got it” and we started packing up our gear. John said that he had what felt to him like an out of body experience singing the song. I was very happy. I knew I had the video but at that point I did not know that it would consist mainly of the two takes of John playing in the grass I just had shot on a split screen without one single cut.
Was the rest of the time wasted? Was it a waist to get up so early every morning, to work so hard and not to use anything we had recorded? Absolutely not! We needed that time to get here, to tire us down, to get us to a point to be able to let go.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3t5Iytoa48]
"Somewhere Video" West Marin/Close to San Francisco 05-05-08 at 05:31 PM
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