On Sunday, anything but fresh from playing a full evening’s music on the other side of London the night before, the Filthy Spectacula assembled at a suburban semi in Twickenham. Joining us, director / video-making one-man band (for this job) Dan Cayzer and an increasing band of cast and extras – special credit here to actress Julie Cloke and long-term band associate and collaborator Greg O’Regan. The task: shoot the band’s second music video, in a day.

If you’re thinking glamour, doing some poncing about for a few minutes in front of a camera and then wandering home, forget it. I was there for 13 hours; Dan it was more like 15 with setting up at the first location and packing up at the second. Inevitably there was a lot of waiting around as different groups / combinations of people did their bits (downside of only having budget for one camera operator) and sets / lighting were re-arranged; no let-up for Dan though.

Things I’d never noticed before, or had forgotten, about being filmed in a non-documentary context:

Even up-to-date low-energy video lights make a room really warm really quickly. Especially shooting during daylight as excluding the natural light (to avoid shadows etc.) generally means excluding the ventilation too. Even more so when most of the shots are either in bed or involving a lot of bouncing around from the cast.

When you’re tight on time, it’s difficult (and I suppose unnecessary) to tell whether the director is getting you to do the shot again because you fluffed something, or in order to get a different camera angle. Either way you end up doing most things three or four times.

You wouldn’t believe how much hard work it is to produce 3.5 minutes of footage over the course of 12 hours!

Given how well the previous video with Dan and the band turned out, we’re very confident this will be a great piece of work. I’m not going to give too much away about what happens in the video, but suffice to say:
The song is ‘Ode to Drunk Romeos’, available from all good streaming/download providers or as part of the album Thrup’ny Upright which is available as CD and/or digital download from our website if you want to send a noticeable amount of money our way!
The literal morning after a hard work night when we were filming was mostly taken up with representing a selection of mornings after in the traditional sense; that was then confusingly followed by enacting what might have been one or several nights before …