Behind the Scenes: Fenella Music Videos
We’ve done three music videos for Fenella, they are all different, but have some common threads which run through them. Here’s the background on them.
I first came across Fenella when I played a show with Emme Woods at Citizen’s Theatre:
Once I’d got over sharing a bill with the original Kristine Kochanski and the woman who Kurt Cobain named his daughter after, we enjoyed the other acts.
Barrie and I thought Fenella(Mairi Whittle and Jack Boyce) were brilliant. There was a wonderful combination of lounge jazz and a kind of Berlin Caberet Brecht/Weill thing going on. This was combined with a kind of 60’s smokiness. As avid fans of the Doors, we thought It was a great package.
I Will Not Win
She spoke to me back stage about wanting to do a music video based around Andy Warhol screen tests:
I thought it was a great idea that would fit her music wonderfully. We knocked a few ideas back and forth and then I had her and Jack round for some filming.
The concept was wonderfully simple and required little editing. I set up a black backdrop and then shot her with various lenses. Some wide, some vintage, some close.
Each time, I’d leave her alone in the other room and set a timer. She would just be left staring down the barrel of the camera in her own thoughts for 5 minutes. Me and Jack would sit in the the other room and talk shite while she was staring at a camera in a silent room. I thought it made for a really intimate and vulnerable visual. There’s absolutely no narrative, so the viewer is left to interpret her stare in their own way.
We then sat and went through the shots on the different lenses and chose a 3 minute segment that we liked. We overlaid some simple vintage effects to accentuate the 60’s feel.
It’s one of my favourite videos and has had some great feedback over the years:
We took some photos at the same shoot and one of them was used for the album cover:
Shooter
The second single from the album was ‘Shooter’. Mairi and Jack came round with some rough ideas and a few props. We took influence from films like ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and True romance. Without much planning, we decided to build on the previous video and have Mairi staring at the camera. We’d then build up a video of a combination of shots, but added lip syncing to differ from the last video. The location was under a tree next to my house. We filmed at dusk which was great for providing the film noir light. An added bonus was that Mairi was freezing. Which added to the psychological dilemma presented in the song.
They’d brought round a toy gun, but it looked like a toy gun, so we smeared it in shoe polish and lit it(As a child of the 80s I knew from the film ‘FX’ that shoe polish was flammable). I also had a copy of ‘Catcher in the rye’ on my bookshelf. It’s been associated with killers and assassins over the years so I thought it could add to the darkness of the themes.
For the end, we wanted to question whether it was Fantasy or Reality. There are short flashes of Mairi surrounded by dead bodies. One is a friend visiting from Holland, one is Jack and one is Alex who had arrived to do some Al & the bad Decisions recording in the evening.
“we’re round the corner under a tree setting a toy gun on fire”
He agreed to play a dead body on the condition that he could lie in the same way as Peter from Family Guy:
The final product has a wonderful film noir feel and really plays to the theatric nature of Fenella’s songwriting. This was a rare case of a video which had little to no planning which worked out pretty well:
Malicious
The third single was malicious. Trying to build on what we did, I thought this one should be in colour. Mairi fancied a beach scene with 60’s 8mm film overlay.
We agreed on Ayr on a cold spring morning. I knew it well and knew we could have some big wide shots which would be really effective.
The plan was to create a single shot of Mairi lip syncing to camera along the beach. Like much of the west coast of Scotland there is 60’s brutalist architecture in the form of concrete modern art. How our ancestors managed to enjoy the views of Arran and nature without their assistance will remain a mystery lost to history. They do however make for a good bleak backdrop and give things a retro feel.
We took a few takes with a few different camera options. We had a gopro on a gimbal, and a 5D on a home made steadicam. The 5D gave us more lens options than the grope, but the gopro and gimbal combination was far smoother.
The filming was a performance in itself, I had to walk backwards through a back alley, down some steps and onto the beach, being careful not to cast shadow from the morning sun into frame. I was doing all that while trying to frame the shot and not distract Mairi from her role.
Once we had completed a sufficient number of takes it was back to the editing suite to see what we’d captured. With the 8mm overlay on top, it became clear that the go pro was too smooth. It just didn’t convincingly look like old footage. Even the more handheld 5D footage needed frames removed to make it more jittery. The 5D was also far more susceptible to some lovely lens flairs.
I had pushed for a single shot, but it meant we were limited in options for keeping the look and feel of the video. The main issue was the pacing. Some takes got to the beach too early and then the last two thirds of the song would be the same, some were obviously clumsy while progressing backward down the steps to the beach.
The final product and edit creates a wonderful feel which builds on the previous two videos. The beach and the water and the views play a role themselves without being some sort of prog rock ‘Riding along the beach on a white horse’ video:
I love these videos as a set. Fenella’s music is dramatic and dynamic and set in a time which lends itself well to retro looking video.
As always, if you like this and you want to see us do more. Like, Share, comment and interact.