Tuesday 26 July 2011

In The Drink

Poison Popcorn - In The Drink from Jono Sandilands on Vimeo.

Daniel gear + Jono Sandilands
- Music video for Poison Popcorn "In The Drink"

After years of speaking about a collaboration, good friend Daniel Gear and myself finally found the time (albeit very tight time) to work together on a project. We were both approached to submit artwork to Shetland's Vunk Fest art show at Shetland Musuem in July 2011. It was perfect time to work together and the chance to work with video with an afternoon screening of films already being planned. We put in our proposal and were booked with a rough slot for our as-of-yet-non-existent film.

Although we knew it was in July, it wasn't until mid June we realised how quickly time was getting on and we'd better get a move on with the film. We had some brainstorming sessions to come up with the idea for the film. We agreed it would be a music video most likely for Poison Popcorn. We came up with the concept of almost a reverse green screen using green coloured card as the 'portal' allowing a layer below to be revealed. Proof of concept below:

Rough Green Screen Mouth Test #1 from Jono Sandilands on Vimeo.

We needed people, Facebook has alot of them so I put out a call to anyone interested in helping us make the film. This happened to be on the Wednesday before the festival, so needless to say I was slightly anxious we would be done in time.

Thankfully on the night we had a good turn out. Must give out a thanks to everyone involved, it was really great fun making it, and we got some funny looks waving around green bits of card in the middle of the pub. Also must be said at this point, we weren't sure how the final video would look, and knew we would have a busy few days editing the footage together.



Daniel and me called it a night on Wednesday, getting home quite late after some additional footage was filmed (see very end credits of film). On Thursday evening after of day jobs we started the editing process. The first attempt at making the concept work with the footage had us rolling around the floor, amost crying with laughter. Editing at the same time, we managed our workflow to be working on different parts of the video to minimize overall time editing.

We finished the main part of the video at 4am Friday morning, with our day jobs to go to again bright and early. Friday night was spent cleaning up, exporting and producing the credit sequence in time to burn to DVD for Sunday's showing at Shetland Museum & Archives.

Film can now be seen online above, and we are also submitting to this years Screenplay festival. (www.shetlandarts.org/FilmsWanted2011)