In an effort to push the ‘Go to Church’ video to 1,000 views (we can do it people!), I thought I’d write a little behind the scenes snippet about making the video. So, here goes.
The Song
Obviously the backbone for any music video is the song itself. All credit for even having the idea of doing this parody goes straight to Wes Scheidt. Nic Beidel ended up making the beat for us, so you’ll have to go to him if you want the specifics of that. Once we had the beat, a group of us got together at church one Friday night to record the lyrics. As for technical details, were used an iMac hooked up to a mic using an Apogee One. Sorry, didn’t catch the model of the mic. We recorded using Logic. It was a very smooth process. I think the most takes we had on anything was three, maybe four. Granted it was a slightly lengthy process, as we were writing our lyrics on the fly, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable process (if you know my group of friends you know why). By the end of the night we had our song. The amazing Taylor Ronne did all of the final mixing later on while I did the video.
The Video Shoot
Ahh the video… This step was obviously a little more involved. Initially we planned to start the video by having Kyle walk in and throw a Pokéball yelling, “Mr. Bob, I choose you!” and having Mr. Bob popping out. Obviously that didn’t work out so well, but we did know that would require a green screen shot, so that was the first step. I learned the hard way that setting up a green screen by yourself is not among the easiest things to do in the world. In any case, we got a nice collection of generic shots of people dancing in front of the green screen, some of which came in handy (Bob on white at the beginning, Wes and Jacob w/ fake Anson, and the iPod style shot). After that we moved on to other various shots all over the church. If I remember right the next shot was the one outside with the cross.
We learned right then that the biggest challenge was going to be having the music available for every shot. In that case, we ended up playing it off of Kamyron’s iPhone which was barely audible anyway; throwing in the wind made it even more exciting. I believe at one point Mr. Bob just started giving them a ‘finger point’ beat instead of relying on sound. Thankfully we had an iPod tower for most of the inside shots, although it was fairly cumbersome to carry around. Nothing else out of the ordinary happened after that honestly. We journey around the church shooting the various people and scenes. Though exploring all of the extremely random bit in Caleb’s truck bed was pretty interesting. Time did become an issue towards the end and we had to scramble to get our last shoots, and even missed a few we had originally planned, but it all came together and we got what we needed.
Post Production
I suppose I could write all day about editing, since it was easily the most time consuming part of the project, but it honestly wouldn’t be that interesting. I actually spent a good bit of Sunday and Monday afternoon editing the thing that week (cutting Sunday, coloring and effects Monday), but it all came together and I must say, I’m quite pleased with it.
Admittedly some things were different from our original plan, but in hindsight I think everything worked out for the better. From what I’ve seen, people seem to really enjoy it, and that’s the best reward of all.
Without further adieu, here’s the video, in case you haven’t seen it yet!
the_explorer 