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Tuesday, May 25, 2004 The Making of a Music Video It's been one crazy week. Ryan (whose claim to fame is working as a production assistant on a Spike Lee film) and I have spent most of our spare--or not-so-spare--time shooting a music video for "Self-Destructive," which I used to think of as a rather depressing song, a song without hope. But I've been told by many people that hope does permeate the song, despite how futile everything seemed when I was writing it. Ryan says I can't help it, I'm just a hopeful person. With any luck, the video will be done before she--yes, Ryan is a girl--leaves for a dance festival in North Carolina and we'll be able to post it on the site shortly thereafter. It'll be in black and white and was shot in six locations around Ann Arbor: Gallup Park, the Nichols Arboretum, Ryan's apartment, the University of Michigan Law Quad, Campus Chapel, and First Congregational Church. Most of the narrative revolves around a guy-girl relationship intercut with scenes of piano playing in the dark, walking through a cathedral, and traversing the outdoors (an old wooden bridge, a river, forest paths). The footage looks incredible. Throughout filming, I kept seeing things that would make for a great bloopers video (which will probably never be made). We needed a dark space with a sliver of light, but the walls in Ryan's apartment were white. My solution? Creating a backdrop from a burgandy bedsheet. However, we didn't have any push pins, so I used an entire roll of masking tape to attach the sheet to the wall--and it would periodically fall anyway. Between takes I would furiously re-attach the tape to wherever it was supposed to be. Ryan was having problems trying to make the light more defined, and we stumbled upon an elegant solution: a long mirror with its bottom wedged between slots on the back of a chair. At the end of that night, my face and upper body were covered with pollen from the flower she had me dancing with. I looked like I had jaundice. And bedsheets made another appearance in the skirt that I wore for the nature scenes. You'd never know looking at it; Emily Kahn did a wonderful job sewing it, and Ryan and I did an equally wonderful job ripping it up. If you could see the dolly, you'd notice how we were holding it in place with books, usually hymnals, and how they kept falling off with startling thuds. And then there were the many times I pretended to be a monster eating the camera at the end of takes.... This is definitely independent filmmaking at its best. Theme music throughout filming: "Ohio" and "Suitcase" by Over the Rhine. Random sidenote: Meander over to The Adventures of Herman to meet our new mascot. I'll be updating that section of the site regularly as well. ^ Top | 12:01 AM | | | 
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