Behind the Scenes: Stay For Tomorrow - Lipstick Lips

This isn’t from the video shoot. They always dress like this.

Stay For Tomorrow are a four piece alt rock band from Dunfermline. They first got in contact with me for some trumpet:

Me and Fen went through to Gracenote studios in Dunfermline. It was a good fun tune which paid homage to 90’s skate punk bands.

I happened to mention that I made music videos :) I’m always keen for the songs I play on to get as much attention as possible and I was pleased to hear that they had a pretty well formed idea for a video.

The basic concept was to touch base with as many iconic music visuals from the mid 90’s. They were mainly of the skate punk variety, but there was a wonderful reference to East 17 thrown in.

The band really brought loads to the table for this. It was very much the icons of their youth and they only had to top their wardrobes a little with some stuff from eBay.

They wanted each member to be a character from the moodboard and the like all great 90’s punk videos, it would be filmed in a skatepark:

I’ve always really liked playing with the graphics of computer games in music videos. I have some great ideas up my sleeve that have never quite turned into videos, but I immediately thought about the “Character Select” screen in classic computer games. Specifically Tony Hawks:

We then looked at lots of videos from the same period to see how many other ideas we could get.

I established that between the band and I we had fairly limited or fairly dated skateboarding skills, so we needed to hire an expert to give it the right vibe.

I vetoed the idea of a kind of “summer break” party vibe in a half pipe. It would need lots of extras on a cold morning in Scotland pretending that they were teenagers in California. One day I will have the budget for lots of (tanned) extras.

We knocked a storyboard back and forward it was clear that contrary to most story boards, there were so many great ideas that the main challenge was going to be fitting everything in. If anything I was slightly concerned about fitting all the shooting into one day, but we separated it into outdoors and indoor and started the outdoor stuff. That way we could make a decision about whether to postpone the indoor stuff.

I arrived early and caught some drone footage of the empty skatepark for intros. After that The band arrived.

The plan was to film the band miming to the track. With it being an alt rock band - that meant amps and drum kits in the skate bowl. We had a bit of a scout around to choose the best backdrop(or the one where the graffiti didn’t say ‘Jobbies’.) We plumped for the the big circular bowl:

I’ve done every load-in and played on every stage you can imagine, but setting up on a stage with no flat surfaces which has a concrete incline to move an amp down is a new one for me.

We filmed the band running through the track and doing their best skate punk poses - they had clearly been practicing these in the mirror :)

These wide shots are the foundation of every music video. The close up shots are more creative and look cooler, but there’s a real sense of relief for a filmmaker once there’s a backdrop on the timeline for the whole song and you can build up and edit form there. We even managed to squeeze in a 360 shot from the middle of the stage area.

One of the key elements of every 90’s music video was the fisheye lens. Why did this happen? did we develop some technology that made fisheye lenses cheaper in the 90’s?

We’ve had a fisheye lens for years. It’s a bit of a one trick pony, so we tend to use it sporadically and then get bored with it, but this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to ‘Fish’ it out.

Between the ‘Character select’ screen , the wide angles of the band performance and the fisheye character introductions, about a third of the timeline was filled. The rest of the edit was a case of squeezing in all the different ‘Cameos’

This included the classic boy band backing vocal(nowhere near electricity or a studio):

Some Blink 182 cosplay:

A makeshift trumpet quartet:

My spare trumpets were sterilised before to save the band from my cellar and after to save my cellar from the band.

The classic East 17 shot - #Lifegoals:

The backdrop to this was a skatepark where skaters did tricks that no one in the band(or me) could. It was the perfect opportunity to show off the Gopro 360 with (an approximation of) a matrix bullet-time shot:

Once we had all the skatepark shots, we headed off to the bands practice space to do some green screen. This was for the “character select” screen where each band member would float as an avatar waiting to be selected.

This then becomes:

While we were there we took advantage of a shipping container and a car for the band to enter their alter egos as Limp bizkit:

The edit was relatively easy. There was so much content that the main challenge was choosing the absolute best of each shot and squeezing in as much possible.

For graphics Kenneth added suitable fonts and colouring to give it a computer game feel and we did our best to colour grade the whole thing in a way that wouldn’t look out of place beside a Sum 41 or a Good Charlotte video:

The whole process was great fun. There were so many ideas coming from the band that it just became a hotch potch of references. It’s a fun video for the viewer because I think you have to watch it a few times to catch it all.

The next video I do for them will have to be minimalist to provide a bit of balance :)

Please like, subscribe and interact with all the band’s socials here, here and here, and here, and here. Listen to the band on Spotify. Watch the final edit of the video below:

The video went on to win Best Music Video at the Lowlands Music Awards 2023