Friday, May 4, 2012

My first music video

I walked in 15 minutes late to HD studio one day as my teacher was telling the 30 students in the class about how I was heading up an upcoming final project. He goes, "and great, Michael Goldstein is here and in a few short minutes he will tell us all about the pitch he has for a final project!"

This was news to me.

I had briefly discussed with my professor way earlier in the year about integrating Uproar Records into our HD studio class. Uproar is a student led record label that features five artists here at Baylor.  I have helped my good friend Will Meier, who works for Uproar, on a few video projects, which apparently made me the official film and digital media spokesmen for Baylor's record label...

Somehow, like any Goldstein would do, I pulled a ton of stuff out of my butt. I knew Uproar Records wanted to make some music videos, so I pitched that idea the best I could. What came about were two groups of six students each making two music videos for Uproar.  The artists in the videos were Trannie Stevens and my friends Clark Jones and Amy Boykin in a musical duet called O, Loveland.  I headed up the group for O, Loveland because I am a huge fan of their music, and my friend Stacy Wren took up Trannie's video.

I of course immediately deemed myself director as well as producer, and asked my good friend/extremely talented filmmaker Sam Klatt to be the cinematographer/editor (he is a straight up master with a camera in his hands, and just as great in editing). We had two other members in the group, Hannah Youngblood, who was a master with the immense amount of paperwork in preproduction. Also, Ben Dvorak did a heck of a job with the second camera, and both were incredible in setting up the Christmas lights for our night shoot/backyard show.

Sam and I teamed up on the creative vision and story for the video.  We discussed how we wanted to integrate the meaning of the song with visuals that would compliment it.  It was helpful that Clark and Amy are a pretty awesome couple, so they naturally emit great chemistry in front of the camera.  Our stylistic vision was a beautiful, scenic-esque video that we could cut in with shots of them performing the song.  O, Loveland has been known to play a few hipster house shows and they have a cool following at Baylor. I really wanted to play off of that, so I thought it would be awesome to set up a fake backyard, night show and get a bunch of people to come out to be in the video.  That was probably my favorite part about shooting the whole video. We shot the entire thing in one day starting at 7 am, and we were running and gunning all day until about 11 pm. I love the lighting in the backyard show, and it was so fun to see all these people come out and support O, Loveland and help them out on a Sunday night.

If you want to know more about the technical details of the video, let me know, I would love to answer any questions. Also, if you want to know more about the creative vision behind it, or the production process, I'd love to discuss that more.  I am really proud of our work, and it turned out pretty much exactly how I envisioned it, which hardly ever happens haha. My teacher loved it so much he is showcasing it in Geneva, Switzerland between May 11-16 at a SMPTE film festival on 60 foot screens in front of hundreds of people.  My hope is that people appreciate the talented group O, Loveland as well as enjoy their music, and hopefully it helps them build a bigger following. Please check out their EP on Spotify (it's free) and if you like it, buy it for 5 bucks on iTunes. You won't regret it, I promise!

Also, please stay tuned for my next post as it will be featuring and discussing my first short-film that I just finished for my directing class!

With that, here's the link to the music video. I hope you like it and I really hope you full screen it and watch in HD:



Please check out the other groups music video for Trannie Stevens if you have time. She is also an extremely talented singer/songwriter.


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