Behind the scenes: Peter Johnstone - Yoko Ono

I’ve known Peter for a while. He met me at a Wide Days event once and told me he was my neighbour and after that he used to pop in for coffee and we’d discuss music and films. I worked with him on various wee projects before he asked me to do a video for the title track of his Yoko Ono E.P.

Peter had a basic concept of being a tour guide at the Kelvingrove Art Galleries in Glasgow:

To avoid the complexities of council permission and access, we went for a low profile idea of a goPro on a selfie stick with Peter as the tour guide singing the song in place of explaining the exhibits. He made a wonderful homemade sign for an outside establishing shot and then we had a wonderful afternoon of him wandering round the museum and me monitoring him on a mobile phone.

Peter also decided there should be a second location. In homage to Yoko Ono’s film ‘Cut Piece’, we’d film Peter against a green screen having his clothes cut off him by a variety of people. The green screen gave us lee way to design a background during post processing. He hired a number of extras whose hands would come into the frame and cut off a piece of his T-Shirt.

Once we had a basic edit together, we discussed look and feel. Peter liked the idea of a kind of 60’s washed out feel similar to Bella and Sebastian’s video for Jonathan David:

The benefit of Peter living so close was that he could come round and get involved in the edit. We initially experimented with using cinefilm overlays and effects, but felt that the content was getting lost. Instead we colour graded the final edit accordingly achieving a 60’s feel.

The video was premiered by The Skinny

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