Behind the Scenes: John Rush - Sister

John Rush came to me during the Covid-19 lockdown looking for a video for his latest single - Sister. It’s a tight 3 mins of rootsy wonderfulness with catchy hooks. The only remit he gave me was to have some snorricam footage and the ‘Main Character’ running from no-one in empty streets.

With that idea I married it up with one of my unused Lockdown ideas. I reckoned that my garden was big enough to setup a wall of photography paper in order to make a “white photography studio”. We could then populate an empty scene with furniture to create an “otherworldly” flat space. The best way I could describe it was with this still from the Matrix(1999 - The Wakowskis)

Social distancing was the reason, but I loved the idea of creating an indoor scene outdoors. It ties in nicely with how the first silent films were filmed. They would film them on roofs in New York in order to get enough light for the early cameras. The drawback was that some of the ‘indoor’ props would flap about in the wind.

On a hot summers day I bought some flowers and started setting up the photography paper and wondered if I would need to recreate wind with a fan to make the flowers blow in the wind. I needn't have worried. Despite the lovely weather, the photography paper on the lighting stands was like a sail. I nearly snapped several lighting stands trying to keep the ‘scene’ from blowing away. With John on his way, I decided to minimise the ambition a little. I got the Photography paper attached to a wall, but it limited the size of the scene and the position of the wall meant I couldn't get as far away with the camera as I wanted to. Furniture was out the window(or literally not)

With a few different angles, the ‘Flat’ element of the video was done. The results were pretty good, and the footage was really high quality.

In order to get a bit of juxtaposition with the other scenes, I thought that we’d shoot John mainly in alleyways around the west end of Glasgow. I was hoping for perspectives, big lines and cobbles to try and make as much space and depth of field to contrast with the high quality footage. We found a suitable alleyway:

I've been taking advantage of lockdown to do some active viewing and watch a lot of Classic cinema. The idea here was ‘borrow’ from Stanley Kubrick(The Shining, Full Metal Jacket) and The Third Man(Carol Reed - 1949) and do some vanishing point perspective with a wide angle lens(or the best approximation that you can in a back alley in Glasgow)

In order to build tension and some depth, I tried to use big lines and angles. These, I stole from North By Northwest(Hitchcock - 1959) which is all about running and chasing.

For these I used a Z-mount tripod head and got John to run over the camera.

The chase footage was starting to look a little like a “student college project”. John had been using a lot of RGB split effects in his social media posts, so I added this to the video to try and tie they two different environments together. To add to the idea of speed and running, I used jerky transitions made using speed shutter photos rather than video footage. I then created a kind of ghosting double exposure effect which I added to the chasing footage to try and further remove it from being “John running up and down alleyways in Glasgow”. I’m really pleased with the results and look forward to using the white backdrops again.