Behind the scenes: Sister John

We started working with Sister John during lockdown on their single 'How can I keep it alive’:

It was a socially distanced lockdown video, so we talked the band through few ideas and then they sent us footage and we edited it. Incredibly simple but really effective.

In My Place

For the follow-up single ‘In my place’, we had more scope for doing something a little more involved as lockdown eased. The initial talk was to incorporate some 80’s influences which were represented in the sound of the song. We rushed off and made a moodboard to try and collect together some visual cues which represented our youth.

Before we got the chance to buy old copies of Smash Hits and a hair crimper on eBay, the band pointed out that they were thinking about something a little more subtle. We leave it open to another band to give us an excuse to get a ZX spectrum out the loft :)

The band put forward some potential influences:

Having roped in an enthusiastic family member, the band’s concept was “dance like no one is watching”.

Everyone involved was local, so we scouted around for some suitable locations and were eventually pointed to a lovely wee lane in the west end of Glasgow.

Although it’s just a back lane in the middle of a city, it was a great find. It feels a bit more like something out of Coronation street than what you’d find in the west end.

Shooting

Maggie wore an 80’s pair of walkman headphones which were playing the tune and then we filmed her dancing, lip syncing and generally reacting to the tune. There wasn’t a huge amount of direction. We just kind of let her play about with the concept. I initially tried to do a follow shot around the ‘hairpin bend’ of the lane, but this didn’t look as good as I expected. There was a lovely long straight lane, so we did a perspective shot with her dancing towards the camera - mainly just to show off our gimbal :)

I’m guessing Kubrick had a larger team and there was less danger of him skyting on a cobble or kerb while moving backwards.

Once we’d ticked the box of referencing some sort of classic film trope, the rest of the job was just making sure we had enough footage. The west end of Glasgow has some wonderful architecture. I think it’s at it’s best when it’s seen better days; rusty lamp posts and cracked railings. So we explored a few wee scenes like that:

I’m guessing Gene Kelly’s lamppost was far less rusty than ours:

Neil’s top tip for filming #45336636 - if filming near a letter box, watch out for amazon deliveries:

We also proved that we will never be Instagram influencers by trying to get blossoms to fall in front of the lens while filming. This involved throwing sticks, shaking branches and kicking burst footballs at a tree. The end result could easily have been done at the editing stage, but it did make for some great face expressions from Maggie while we filmed our attempts.

Once everything was cut together, we went for quite a saturated colour grading with a lot of blues and oranges. It had been an unusually lovely spring day and it seemed to suit the tune. We’re really happy with the end results. Simple concept and great location over a wonderful Pretenders-esque 3 minute pop song:

Sister John’s music is available from Last Night From Glasgow

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