In November 2012 Kyle Dettman, Aaron Tovi, and I sat down to brain storm ideas for Confessions, a track by Grammy winning artist Lecare. We spent the next 2-3 months planning the largest shoot that the Reach Records has done to date. It was a honor to DP it, here is a little about our process, and the things that I learned from the shoot.
1. Listening
First thing we did was listen to the track, a lot, I mean a ton, we each had a plenty of ideas on where to take the video. One thing we all wanted was to tell a story that wasn’t super obvious at the start. I really believe listening is huge in telling a genuine story, not just for a music video, but for any video you are creating, they are all stories.
2. Setup Dropbox
Dropbox was such a great tool for us to use together. I believe its a huge tool in the current collaborative creative process. It’s a must. It allowed us to share ideas in different locations, on the go, etc. And gather all our different ideas in one place. Even if you are working by yourself, using Dropbox as you main idea location is very helpful.
3. Art Design
Art design is always a huge part of great content. We spent a lot of time honing the look and feel once we finally decided on a direction Aaron Tov’s background is in graphic design and brought tons of great insight and an “outsiders” viewpoint to the video, which is huge. We spent lots of time gathering photos and inspiration and organizing them on Dropbox.
4. Planning
We thought we spent a lot of time planning this video, but looking back on it I think we would all feel there was even more planning we could do. One of the things we learned is bringing a killer producer in on a project this large is a must. If you don’t have a great producer lots of details will just get overlooked. The producer doesn’t have to be part of the whole process but bringing them in on the last 50% of the planning is very helpful.
5. Executing
Because we were mentally processing this shoot for so long, on the day of the shoot I felt that we all really went into autopilot mode, and just executed the plan. Lots of things changed on the day of the shoot with talent but because we had a foundation from pre-production we could me changes very quickly and with little disturbance. We also learned that having a killer AD was huge (thanks Issac Deitz!) for keeping us all aware of the time we had to get every shot done.
Below are some photos, hope you enjoy them and check out the video here!
Source (with more photos): http://fenner.is/blog/2013/4/12/making-of-lecraes-confessions-music-video
