New music video from Mitch Gettman directed and edited by yours truly. Check it out here: http://hearnebraska.org/content/stay-me-gettman-music-video

If you’re like me, you might have heard of Mitch before. At 15, Mitch started posting videos on his youtube account of acoustic versions of some of his influences like Radiohead, Jeff Buckley and U2. With view counts in the hundreds of thousands, he found an audience online. His reception helped to form a band here in town and he has been playing for almost two years now. With only the acoustic songs I had seen online, I was blown away with the mature and rocking sound of his new album. Gettman has written a solid album of mad bittersweet characters yearning after love, life, and happiness. In working on this video, we mused on the album title, a Jack Kerouac quote. We wanted to project what one does when errant love runs off. We both agreed that fireworks were a centerpiece image, exploring wonder and danger, energy and contemplation. Take a moment and let the sweet release of this video set in while fireworks make your heart grow fonder.

A web friend and band publicist, Patrice Fehlen from September Gurl, talked to me awhile ago about shooting a video for the elegant Eliza Blue. I checked out her website and saw these opulent promo pics and then heard her polished cinematic album and worried Patrice might not have called the right guy. I mentioned to Eliza before we met up that I wanted to add a bit more rough edges to her persona and she easily agreed. What was most important to me was to bring a live feel to the video. So many videos are just a band playing a song in park, or train station or old building but I wanted to still stretch from this played out motif and add back in some music video elements in a short time period.

I brought Dan Welk along again and we met up in an old warehouse where I used to work. We attempted to get to the roof but it actually was rather boring (and I might add dangerous) and we crawled back down to the top floor. There we saw this odd door frame leaning up next to a window and I just thought that was great. We found a few chairs and we’re ready.

Again I was operating my T2i with Dan’s 70-200mm 4.0 and Dan used a 18-70 on his 5D2. We had a hidden wireless on Eliza and a second mic pointed at the percussionist off the frame. Both plugged into a H4N. We ended up recording the song three times getting six different angles. I originally thought I would only use one take to edit to but eliza played each so well and all the angles worked well to mix into. Since we still had some time we walked down to some train tracks by the river and  starting shooting for the hell of it. I didn’t know if anything we shot would make sense but I was excited to get some fun shots and just maybe it would make its way in. Luckily we had the hour of power in our favor and we quickly came up with a list of shots and got them fairly quickly and easily.

In the edit, I synced the live shots with Pluraleyes and got some film burns loaded. The edit came easily and it almost seemed like there was a little story in the music video elements. Enough to seem coherent, but lots of mystery and hopefully not too pretentious. Really loving this camera, can’t wait to get some nice glass on it and see it really shine. Let me know what you think.

I shot, edited, and directed this no-budget music video for the Poison Control Center’s single “Being Gone” off their new 2nd full length, “SAD SOUR FUTURE.”  The video was shot in the band’s home digs of Ames, IA  on sunny Sunday afternoon with a Sony HVRV1U. ”SAD SOUR FUTURE” will be released on Afternoon Records May 18th 2010!

Linkage:

Poison Control Center

Afternoon Records