Behind the Scenes - Anton and The Colts: Boy Living For The Weekend

At the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, Anton approached me and told me that he’d convinced a record label in California(need to know music) to release his next single ‘Boy Living For the Weekend’. How could we create some content during the strictest social distancing rules we’d ever known?

I came up with a few ideas of how Anton could film on his phone and a GoPro.

Chase a selfie stick round the room a la Peter Johnstone:

Play several characters in the same scene and then sync all the footage. I made a wee proof of concept:

Timelapse footage either shot on the iPhone or GoPro:

With all this we knocked some ideas back and forward via email. Anton jumped on the idea of a ‘Lockdown party’ where he played all the characters. He came round to my place and I deposited tripods, lights and a gopro on the street outside after they’d all been wiped down with anti-bac gel. Anton would then setup a variety of scenes at his place and act out the various characters. He’d then arrive at the studio window and pass me an SD card, I’d pass him a coffee. We’d then go over the footage and I’d give feedback and suggest improvements. It wouldn't be an understatement to say that in the early days of the lockdown it was our main focus. He was ‘tanning the bucky’ and having a party with himself and I was working out how to crop together all this footage into a coherent whole where you couldn’t see the joins.

With wonderful scenes, but no clear linear narrative, we decided to give the viewer respite in the from of cut scenes around Glasgow. The record label were keen on seeing as much of Glasgow as possible, so Anton took timelapse footage from his car by varying up the route from mine to his each day. We also added a cut scene in the centre of Glasgow to take advantage of the empty streets.

We wanted to make it obvious that there were specific characters in the video, so we decided to name them and incorporate their introduction into the title scenes. We’d already leaned quite heavily on Trainspotting(1996 - Danny Boyle) for the creation of a ‘Mad, working class, Scottish Houseparty’. One of the characters was even called ‘Spud’ at the planning stages. We borrowed from their title introductions: