Christiana and Colin Flanigan approached me last Fall with the proposition of creating a music video for their
band, The Aches. I’m a personal friend of theirs–I made silly videos with Chris in high school–and I’ve
done photography and video work for their band before. We decided to make a video for Prodigals, a track
from their newly released EP, Your Broken Hand. Not only is it my favorite song of theirs, but it’s also the
most energetic and driving track on the EP, and when I listened to it I envisioned the duo relentlessly walking
towards the camera through an urban environment while singing.
Chris and Colin wanted to collaborate closely with me on the video so we did some scouting together around
their home town of Kenosha, finding some suitably urban areas to shoot in. Kenosha is a great shooting
location because it has a big city look but isn’t super busy, which means there’s plenty of open space and
very little risk of getting in anyone’s way.
Autumn was fading fast so on a Saturday in mid November we shot the exterior scenes. The budget was very
limited so I couldn’t afford to rent a motorized gimbal to stabilize my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera for
the walking footage. Instead, I used a borrowed wheelchair and my brother Scott’s muscles. I sat in the
chair with the camera on a hand-held rig and Scott walked quickly backwards, pulling the chair as Chris and
Colin walked towards me. I shot with a 7.5mm and a 12mm lens to reduce the shakiness, but there’s still
plenty of shake in the footage, mostly due to uneven sidewalks. Instead of stabilizing the footage in post,
I decided to leave the shakiness in because it gives the final video a rough punk vibe.
The video ends with Scott abandoning the wheelchair and running away, with Chris and Colin giving chase. It
was a fun concluding shot but a bit tricky to pull off. Scott had to spin the wheelchair I was sitting
in so that the camera would be facing the right way to capture his escape. It took a couple tries, along with
a few near wipe-outs, but we finally nailed it.
A couple weeks after the exterior shoot we assembled the rest of the band in a church sanctuary and shot the
musical performance. I used two LED Fresnels set to spots to light the band, as well as three Fotodiox
Studio Flapjacks–graciously lent to me from my work–to separate the band members from the dark background.
These lights also doubled as in-shot beauty lights and I used them to compose the band in wide shots and
frame the individual performers in close-ups.
Here’s a behind the scenes video I made for Fotodiox about the lighting process I used on the shoot:
And here’s the finished product, Prodigals: