Back in early May (2007), I got a chance to shoot a music video for Morningbell’s song, Faster Than Eagles, Stronger Than Lions It was co-directed by Andrew Kamphey and myself.

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We came up with this great formalist concept about the whole video being lit by flashlights. The band would appear and disappear, and the lights would be held by eight people dressed in black and choreographed to created the “movement” in the video that usually is created in “more standard videos” by quick editing.

• The video would begin with the room lights on to establish the conceit of 8 people in black holding lights.
• The room lights would immediately turn off and there’d be a torrent of flashlights choreography for the first 16 bars or so, after which the lights would show restraint building up to the final guitar solo when we’d see the torrent again.
• The flashlights would then turn off and the room lights would turn on again. The band and the flashlight holders would walk out of the room.

That was the plan.

In terms of execution, I think we totally failed in what we tried to do.

There were some technical things that were out of our hands:

• We couldn’t get permission use the fog machines we had which crippled the amount of light the flashlights could create and completely destroyed the look I was going for.
• Right before we started shooting, we found out about playback problem that would cause everything to be out of sync if we shot in 10 second sections like I’d planned. We had to shoot full song masters and edit from those.

Mostly though, the problems were just human error and inexperience.

• The flashlight holders were too far apart and the room was too big. Without the fog diffusing the light, we were working in a room that was way too dark.
• I didn’t get enough static non-dolly shots to accurately show the choreography.
• I don’t think I’m a skilled enough editor to use the restraint necessary for our original concept. I wanted too much movement, and I wanted to use all of the “good” shots that I could without much regard to the original concept.

In the end, what we ended up with is a decent performance music video with an interesting look. Not high concept, but I think it turned out alright and I really appreciate that Eric and Travis had enough faith in me to let me do it. I also really want to thank everybody who showed up to hold flashlights and yell the choreography moves to the people holding flashlights. I had a lot of fun.