Matt Campbell and My Little Funny

This is a quick post about a cool project an interesting guy I know has going on.

Matt Campbell is a New Zealand born artist and advertising creative director.

He’s worked across a bunch of interesting jobs – from beginning in design at Flying Nun a fair few years ago  through to designing fabrics and prints for Japanese brand Hysteric Mini and also having spent time in New York heping run an artist led gallery and as design and digital director at ad giant BBH.

While at BBH Matt worked on some massive work launching Axe – what we call Lynx. They pretty much invented that category and hold the record for the fastest product to reach the 100Million sales mark. He also won awards from pretty much everyone that gives them for that work.

I do a bit of ad creative as copywriter to Matt’s art director and have very much enjoyed meeting, working, and laughing with Matt who is an astute observer and enthusiast for life’s ludicrous side.

Which is all a rather roundabout way of introducing an interview we did with Matt for Public Address Radio on MyLittleFunny.com – his new project.

Matt has a long interest and expertise in the graphic arts and world of comic characters. For MyLittleFunny.com Matt has paired up with comic legend and good friend Kaz and is making his long running strip Underworld into short animations.

Underworld is little known here outside of comic circles but is widely circulated in the States – in alternative weeklies like The Village Voice and the SF Bay Guardian. Kaz has also, according to my friend wikipedia, worked on SpongeBob SquarePants.

Underworld is wry social commentary and dark humour all in one but is not cynical for the sake of it.

The plan with MyLittleFunny – which you can sign up to to be kept abreast of the latest updates as they make more videos – is to keep growing the database and find a way to create more and more of this great content.

Even the loading guy is cool

Have a listen to this interview Damian Christie and I did for Public Address Radio here to learn more about the process,  about Kaz, about why they are doing it and where they hope it will go..

And do go have a nosey on the site here.

Suicide Reporting

Running With Scissors Idea Generation

Running With Scissors are an outfit that I have done a bit of work with over the last couple of years. They have impressed me with their take on the world. So when The Ad Show wanted to do a show on creativity we thought it could be cool to show the RWS approach to idea generation (that’s brainstorming for people in the non ad-world).

Quite a few companies claim that they are not doing traditional advertising and they are not like other agencies. But RWS actually do do things differently.

They get people from different backgrounds along to the brainstorms -- the idea goes that if you just get ad people you will just get advertising ideas.

The projects I have worked on with them -- like Mission Motuihe and The Nikolai Organisation in general, were a bit different to your everyday advertising. I am writing up a bit of a case study of the NO thingy for my new website but in the meantime here is the story on the RWS approach:

It should be stressed that this idea generation session approach is pretty much step 1 and 2 of a longer creative process. After the ideas come in from the brainstorm they are then analysed against a whole set of criteria to work out what new directions could be found.

I’ve been involved in a few of these and have found that they really do take you to some unexpected places and that there is something kind of kinetic about the ideas sparking off each other when it is working at its best.

MEDIA MOMENT – How to Watch TV Online.

Here are some notes to go with the chat with Nick D on georgefm.

I love TV. For most local TV I watch it on demand on the TVNZ and TV3 and C4 services. I find them often buggy and hard to use and have to swap browsers and redownload flash every five minutes – but I love being able to watch shows whenever. I haven’t watched any TV at its broadcast time in about three years except the news and live sport.

I really like to keep up with international shows. I review media and work in TV. I find it very helpful.

What I don’t love is waiting months for NZ TV to show it. Or perhaps never to show it. So luckily for people like me there is the internet.

There are a number of very helpful sites that allow you to keep up with all the best international TV.

These are places where you can watch international shows – pretty much anything great you can think of:

www.ninjavideo.net

http://tv.blinkx.com/

http://www.tvduck.com/

It is as simple as going there – choosing what you want and following some links.It may take a bit of persistence – not all links are good.

For all of these you have to be careful about spyware so be very careful what you click yes to. DON’T give email addresses or credit card details to ANYTHING.

For most of these you should be able to find a megavideo or ninjavideo link that is free and good and requires no registration.

For many of the links you might get a message that says that you are in the wrong region.

We can fix this. What you need is a proxy IP address. What this means is a way to trick the internet into thinking you are in the right country. It is kind of like changing your number as it would appear on other people’s caller ID so they think you are somewhere else.

One easy way to do this is to use the firefox browser and download an extension called foxyproxy http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/

What you do is download this and follow the instructions. They have video tutorials on how to use it. You will need to get a proxy ip address for the country you want to pretend to be in. Sometimes foxy proxy manages by itself – otherwise you click add proxy and submit a proxy address you can find here:

http://hidemyass.com/proxy-list/

Once you have these powers you can watch anything in the BBC iplayer which has A-feckin-mazing content – - see the tutorial here:http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/help.html

or you can try and go on sites like Hulu.com – which is a bit harder to crack.

Another interesting option for watching stuff as it airs – like live sporting events is Justin.Tv. This started as a lifestreaming site as Justin broadcast his every move. But it has now changed to also offer live streaming of all sorts.

This can be of a goldfish in a bowl right through to the NBA finals. The best way to find out what live stuff is where – I have found – is to search twitter for justintv – -people announce what they are about to play. Because this is real time it is hard for copyright holders to take it down before you see it!

It can also be cool to go on there and simply search entertainment and watch whatever movie happens to be on.

In entirely unrelated news I cancelled my sky subscription the other day.

As ever if you have helpful information around other sites or can improve what I have here please add a comment! Sharing is good.

Of course nothing here supports or encourages copyright theft etc. This is for the purposes of review etc. Don’t sue me etc.

Ad MASH 20/5/10 All About Experiential Advertising

Experiential advertising is a bit of a cover-all term applied to activities that engage the customer in some real-life way.

The category can include Guerrilla, Ambient and Promo or PR activities.

One general rule is that there is some kind of experience involved (as you would have guessed…) -- like this nice example from Coke:

We had Steve Kane from DDB on to talk Experiential on The Ad Show -- he particularly liked this campaign as he said that it didn’t need an end tag to let you know who it was for. He stated -- and I think that is a very good thought -- that you ought to know from the experience what it is for.

Which is somewhere that this fantastically interactive work for Volkswagon actually falls down a bit. It isn’t essentially about Volkswagon or Volkswagon experiences.

What they did was stage a series of actions to make things fun.

Like here where they turned stairs into piano keys. This drove more people to take the stairs.

They were attempting to prove that if you make something fun more people will do it. Tune in next week when they prove water is wet. And attach the Volkswagon brand to it….

Not that the work wasn’t cool -- -here is another nifty long bow from the campaign:

The rest of the campaign is here.

Sometime Experiential can be like a public artwork or sculpture -- like this wonderful local work for the Rodney District Council by Saatchi and Saatchi.

It won up big at Axis and is smashing (groan) and rather deserves to be seen by a wider audience.

Experiential can also take the form of one of any of a million flash mob ripoffs, like this one for H&M clothes in San Fran:

Othertimes it can be quite technological -- like with this augmented Reality Rock Paper Scissors game for magazine T-Post -- where the shirt plays you:

Some Experiential activities can be full-on events that actually accomplish something cool -- like this work I did with Hadleigh Averill for Smirnoff -- -350 people went to an island and planted 22,400 trees.  That was an experience.

Often Experiential actions are undertaken with an eye to generating media coverage. Like Air New Zealand’s Cranial Billboards that, unlike the scalps, were well covered.

So -- -although I’m sure people could quibble about labels and where some of these might fit elsewhere it is probably safe to say that at it’s heart Experiential is about individual interaction. Which has limited effectiveness -- in that the reach could be restricted to however many individuals you could individually interact with. Thankfully (for experiential advertisers) the internet now serves to store and spread the ideas and the engagements.

As with this vending machine idea for coke. While it was only experienced by a handful of people it has gone on to be viewed nearly 2.5 million times on YouTube.

In fact Steve, referring to that idea  said that in a way YouTube islike  the broadcast arm of experiential. He was very entertaining -- you should check out his turn on The Ad Show, I’ll post a link once it is online.

AD MASH 13/5/10

This trailer that aired on Dutch TV had many wondering what this new show was:

‘Men with Talent’ was the end tag.

It turned out to be a teaser for a spot from the same people behind this exceptional Heineken ad -

In that ad they took a masculine yet witty look at a female concept --  the walk in wardrobe  - -and turned it to a walk in chiller

That first tease was followed up by this spot that takes a Heineken look at the current fad for talent shows that are a bit girly….

No Susan Boyle or fake tears here.

There is even a website that you can go to to vote on your favourite talent and performer and see their bios and extended video. Though at this stage it would be pretty handy if you spoke Dutch as that’s what everything is in.

Httpv://www.heineken.nl/campagnes/mwt/main.aspx

Also this week -- some more cool branded content: this is from a Ridley Scott curated project:

It has been getting good notes from Brandview and Anthony Gardiner

It is very cool -- -in it the same esoteric dialogue is interpreted by a bunch of different directors. People can vote and make their own etc.

The link is here: http://www.cinema.philips.com/

This is a cool website: -

Http://www.mostawesomestthingever.com/

And is from an agency so I guess counts….

And then there is this:

For google -- that is awesomemememememe way of showing their pace.

There is this making of here:

Another thing: sometimes advertising is as simple as taking something from the pop culture and banging your logo on it.

Like these ads for the Endangered Wildlife Trust:

They are totally lifted (acknowledgedly) from here.

And just quickly —some great print ads- -there was these that I love

Http://www.ibelieveinadv.com/2010/05/sekunda-glue-ballerina-soldiers/

Which are just such a cool way of conveying extended life.

and:

Http://www.ibelieveinadv.com/2010/05/hansaplast-finger-hand-knee/

Which is just a magic visual.

And here is me and Wammo chatting about all of these:

Ad Feature on Wammo’s Breakfast: Tiger Woods, T-Mobile.

This morning’s ad feature on Wammo’s show.

Topics include: Multi Kai cooking, Nike’s Tiger Wood’s ad and the parodies and the T-Mobile Dance:

That dance idea was inspired in part by this:

To see the full story on the T-Mobile dance and the Kiwi connection in the form of Planner Jason Lonsdale head to this link and watch part 4.

urbis magazine cover feature

URBIS 55 is out now.

I wrote a story in this latest mag to accompany a photo-feature for a very cool apartment. The apartment was designed by Glamuzina Paterson – Architecture Ltd.

The apartment is featured on the cover and the story is available to read on the Urbis Website here.

The editor, Nicole Stock, asked me to write a story as a non-specialist-architecture-writer to try to get a narrative that was different to what you might expect to read from an expert.

It was really interesting to do the research and learn about processes used and what exactly the design process was trying to achieve. I’ve written many stories about design before through writing for FQ Man, Remix, Pavement etc but this was the first on architectural design. Many of the same writing structures applied – -trying to understand and convey context, the brief, what the designer is trying to communicate, the processes and craft involved and the place in the career or canon of the designer.

Of course not all that might come in to play in only 600 words, as this story was, but that is the framework anyway.

If you get a chance check out URBIS; it is a great magazine. It spots design talent really well. For example they have a story this month on local shoemakers tobe. The shoes look fantastic. They are doing a series of POP-UP stores around the country. Check them out on www.tobe.co.nz.

As an internet extra – here is the contributors spot I did for the latest URBIS. You’ll note I got in a plug for Ingrid’s website…..

I work in TV, advertising and media production. My main gig is currently The Ad Show on TVNZ7. I love the variety of working over a few different disciplines. I also try to help however I can with my lady’s label IngridStarnes.com

I love unusual things about cities. I find Supermarkets, for example, to be tremendously optimistic symbols of plenty and provision. I go to Pak’n'Save and marvel at how the spice aisle has more spice than it would have taken to start a war a couple of hundred years ago. Or that people can spend a quarter of their weekly income and eat a better and more varied diet than any king in history. There are many wonderful things like this that cities and their economies of scale have thrown up.

And the worst?

In a slight contradiction to the super-supermarket sentiment I am not keen on Shopping Malls. That people spend so much time passively shopping as a leisure activity is weird to me; it’s a pretty poor amusement park.

I am a big fan of Jens Lekman. He is a wonderful Swede, lately living in Melbourne. He recently played here and was even better than I’d hoped.

I don’t wear jewelery except, I suppose, my glasses and watch. I have a 40s Omega with a brushed steel face. Very simple railway-clock like  numbers and a brown leather strap. I am very fond of that.

I don’t know if I’ve ever really tried to put a motto into words, but I guess I try to stay positive and work hard. Say yes and then work out a way to do it! And I’m a big believer in just starting things and trying it out. Even if it doesn’t quite work to plan you learn a lot and new opportunities emerge.

I would love to go to Istanbul in particular and Turkey generally. Though we might have to wait for the 20 month old twins to get a bit older as you really want to be traveling to places where you have an extra set of hands. With that in mind we are definitely hoping to get to Tokyo to see Ingrid’s Dad there later this year.

spellbound – the making of a music video

BEHIND THE SCENES ON SPELLBOUND

Recently I directed a music video for Spellbound, the new single from TokyoStreetGang, the pop side project of my friends Jay Bulletproof and Bene Shanks. Having watched, written about and appeared in a couple of videos it was quite a blast to make one. I thought I might write a little about how I did stuff, and then a little something about how people could try to make a video just in case this might be helpful to any aspiring music video makers out there. This is not meant to be the last word on anything, obviously, but I hope that by telling how things worked for me that might be useful or interesting to someone out there.

This is the longer, more detailed version of the story that appears in Rip It Up magazine this month. Click on that link to go download the exclusive tracks they have for readers right now.

The video this is all about is at the end of this next section -- ‘Developing An Idea’- which hopefully will explain a bit about the ideas informing the vid before you watch it.

DEVELOPING AN IDEA

The first thing I had to do to make the video was to come up with an appropriate, fitting and actually doable idea for the video.

In the case of Spellbound I had a song with a twisted pop sensibility. The track was written about the feeling that you have when you fall in love with someone and how it is a kind of madness that envelops you. The song looks at how if the relationship doesn’t work out you then look back on the time that you were in love and out of your mind and you feel embarrassed and resentful that you had those feelings. And you also feel a little sad that all that hope was wasted.

Well, that is what I took the song to mean after speaking to Jay about his mind-state when he wrote it and what he was trying to say with the song. In order to learn about the song I interviewed him and talked with him about what I took from the song.

I also asked him about what he was wanting to do with this side-project -- -he is a well established and globally respected drum and bass and now also dubstep producer – so by branching out into synth-pop territory I wanted to know what it was he was wanting to express in this genre and what moods he was bringing from his home genres. Not that genre matters particularly. I firmly believe there are no bad genres, only bad tracks – and this track and entire project are killer.

Anyhow – I took what I learnt from Jay about his meaning and I wrote out all the lyrics and I timed out all the sections of the song and I looked at the structure. And then I listened, and I listened and I listened and I listened to the song. In the car, at home doing the dishes, at the gym. Again and again on repeat as I thought up and discarded mental images, tried to find colours and actions and images that worked with the music.

Nico working her magic. Photo: James Dudley

The song struck me for a number of reasons and I really wanted to make the video because of these. It was a sinister twisted pop. On first listen it might sound like it has some traditional pop elements but when you listen you can see that there is poison in this candy. I loved the idea of trying to subvert a traditional pop video format. And the structure appealed to me in that it was not a typical verse chorus verse chorus set up with a lot of variation between pacing and a beginning middle and end.

This song starts at full-throttle from about ten seconds in and the rhythm and intensity of the lyrics run unrelenting for two and a half minutes before the singing simply stops and the beat carries on, wordless for another minute. This is unusual in a pop song and as a result my thoughts for a treatment started to form around the idea of there being a repeated linear mission to the song that starts, is methodically executed and ends.

There is also a wonderful pads synth progression that plays out every ten seconds or so for that last minute and it just conjured a slow-mo explosion image in my head every time I heard it. There is something triumphant about an explosion I reckon.

After listening to the song a number of times and thinking about the mood and feel the ideas of having twisted pop-style neon colours and explosions were solidifying. I also really wanted to shoot something at a storage unit. I love storage unit facilities as they are like the recesses of the brain.

What do I mean by that? Well, they are places where people store things that they don’t know how to deal with but can’t quite do without. In this way unpleasant memories are just like all your old junk. I also love storage units because they are almost optical illusions – as you look down the uniform corridors they are like a trick played on the brain – the corridors of the subconscious – rows and rows of indistinguishable identical doors with who knows what within. Couple this with the fact that storage units are contradictory in that they are absolutely uniform and the same on the outside yet extremely personal on the inside and you have all these ideas coming together that make me think of the mind.

A shot from my scouting mission to the storage Unit.

So the idea formed that it would be cool to do a video that was effectively a dream/wish fulfilment sequence where Jay would visit his mind and obliterate symbols of the future he now wouldn’t get to have with the girl he had broken up with.

I thought this might work for the relentless tempo of the track and would tell a linear story in a twisted way. The plan was to have him arrive at a storage unit, have him head upstairs with a massive gun and a rose and then have him walk in and out of four rooms destroying the contents inside that symbolised love, dating, marriage and time together. He would then discard the instruments of destruction and just leave with the rose, symbolising hope and the future having blown away his anger.

So all this thinking went in to something that most people will look at but probably not start to analyse at all.

This kind of idea-based execution is only one way to make a video of course – some people make a video to experiment with editing techniques, or image treatment or tricks of some kind to animate images to music. Some videos go for a performance route. Some want a party vibe. There is no right or wrong way – but this was my approach.

I then took the idea and essentially tried to sell it to Jay. I showed him I was enthusiastic and what my thinking behind it was. I told him how I wanted him to perform and what I wanted it to do for him. Thank fucksticks he agreed – as it was entirely dependent on his performance and being into it.

This is the video  that we ended up making -so having read the above you might see what I was trying to do (hopefully):

GETTING THE IDEA READY TO MAKE

So, the idea was to have Jay literally shoot these items symbolising love and then film it with a super high-speed camera so that we could see the impact of the bullets like it was a time-lapse nature photo in super slow motion.

Unfortunately this Plan A would have needed someone to give us a real gun and bullets or special effects explosions for the gunshot effect and then also a camera called a Phantom to get the super speed shots.  Together this would have cost upwards of $15000. So we had to find a way to get the effect within budget.

There is a Camera called a RED. It is kind of like a bridge between digital and film. It takes incredible resolution digital images that you can then manipulate well in post-production because of that super-high resolution. It also has the ability to film at 120 frames per second. What this means is that in normal filming you would get 25 frames per second. These frames run one after another as still images and because of the number of them we perceive them to be moving images instead of a series of stills. When you film at 120 fps you see a lot more of the image – especially if you then alter the speed you play it back with a video effect.

The RED. Photo: James Dudley

The RED is getting a lot of use in music videos as it gives great pictures and is relatively affordable -- -you can generally rent one for a special music video rate of around 1000 bucks a day including lenses and a tripod and other bits and pieces you need. There are a number of them in town -- the people that helped us out were C4 Camera.

The time-lapse shots you see of a flower opening and the pollen flying out in nature documentaries are shot on 1000 plus fps. But 120 would have to do. So that was the impact effect sussed. But we really needed explosions still.

Luckily I have a friend named Murray Green who is an artist and good man. He is able to build most things. He has a friend named Barney. And between them they can do anything. They spent a fortnight of spare time building bombs to work out how much explosive we needed to blow things up and also came up with great ideas around prop design and the weapons we ended up using. They came up with the idea of using a paintball gun as it would give the firing effect without needing professional armourers and real machine guns – plus the guns would look twisted and sinister without getting us a Restricted rating from the censors that would mean we wouldn’t get to play the video.

Pyro genius Barney about to detonate a cake at a practice session

Having helpful and onto-it people on board making things to blow up we now needed a place to do it. I contacted Storage King St Lukes by simply bowling on up. I told them what I was thinking and the wonderful management and staff there – a man named Aaron  and a true gem of a woman Kim Harvey; they couldn’t have been more helpful. Imagine this conversation:

ME: Hi, I’m someone you don’t know from Adam. I’d like to turn up and make a music video in your business. I have no money to pay you and my concept involves blowing stuff up and firing guns. What do you say?

THEM: Sure thing; what a cool idea. Come check out the upstairs area that is totally empty of clients but has heaps of built lockers big enough for you to build sets inside and so perfect for your every need.

This is pretty much exactly what happened. I still can’t believe it really. If it wasn’t for helpful and accommodating people like the Storage King people music videos simply wouldn’t get made. Ask anyone who has made a vid and they will have their own Kim and Aarons I’ll bet you.

Anyway, so I found a venue, tried to find out if the censors would let us show cartoon explosions on their ‘G’ Rated music vid shows  -- apparently all the bump and grind and shaking booty is totally cool but you have to be very careful once there is any implied violence that it isn’t too realistic. Funny world we live in.

I then involved my friend Warren Green, a highly respected director and producer who made the Tutt’s video for ‘K’ and the Tiki video for Faded among others. He was DOP for this. He walked through the venue and helped me work out what shots were possible, desirable and sensible. He worked to find out how he as Director of Photography could make the look I was going for. And he offered very good advice about varying shots, injecting different elements and other ideas that improved the video.

In fact, pretty much everyone who worked on this video improved it in some way through clever suggestions of easier and sharper ways to do things. I find that if you tell people who know what they are doing what it is you want and then ask them how they think the best way to make that happen they will nearly always have something to add that you simply didn’t know or hadn’t thought of. So I am always asking questions.

Me and Warren Green at work. Photo: James Dudley

Anyway. Once Warren had walked through with me I made a storyboard that showed every single shot that I wanted to get. Storyboards are freely available as templates on the internet so you can see how they work. The way I did it I had the shot, the line in the song or time in the song it corresponded to, a simple drawing of the content in the frame, a description of the movement of the camera, a time of how long it needs to be and what kind of shot it is –as in a close up or a wide shot etc.

So you draw and write down every shot in order. This takes a long time but it makes you think about time and the way movement and shot size relate to each other. Along the way you change a lot of your original thoughts so it ends up taking even longer but you get a much more thoroughly realised result.

Page 2 of my storyboard. As you can see the pics don't have to be great...

NZ ON AIR AND MONEY

You would have seen the NZ on Air logo flash up in the corner of the screen at the beginning and end of music videos. The reason this happens is because every year NZ on Air give out 168 grants of $5000 to help local musicians make music videos.

This is an amazing thing – and it has helped a lot of musicians make videos. You will need to draw down 4000 of this money to get the idea made. On delivery of the video you get the last 1000.

In many cases, if the video is being produced with professional gear or on film with experienced technicians it is also only a fraction of what it actually costs to make a video. The great secret of music videos is all the work that people do for the love to make them happen.
Like I say, it isn’t done for the money. People do it because they get to learn more about the industry, try out new techniques, gain experience with equipment, get good stuff on their showreel -- -to have creative freedom or to make a name for themselves. There are many reasons people do work on a vid. But money certainly isn’t one.

In the real world 5000 may sound like a lot. But in the film industry 5000 is not a lot. For example in order to get your video put on to the right kind of tape so that the music channels can play it can cost up to 500 dollars. If you shoot on film then film and processing even at mates rates is going to cost a good 3000 bucks. If you want to hire a digital camera then it will be anything from 500 to 2000 a day. If you want to get lighting then a truck with all the lighting gear will cost 600 at least a day and that is at a serious discount. If you want to grade the video, which means manipulate the colours in the footage in post-production with a colourist, you are looking at 500 an hour  -- even at a discount. Then you have to think about actors, dancers, wardrobe, make-up, location fees, catering, staff costs, transport – not to mention the opportunity cost of all the time you spend on a vid that is time that people could otherwise be feeding their families.

So anyway – to get it made you need the help of people. Lots of people. Here is a list of everyone involved in this video:

Warren Green – Director of Photography
Spencer Locke-Bonney – Gaffer (person in charge of lighting and electrical matters)
Murray Green – Art Department – he built and made shelves, cakes – sourced props
Barney-  Pyrotechnics Expert. He built and detonated bombs and supplied and used the guns.
Jeremy Masters – Editor Extraordinaire.
Megan Llwellyn – Runner, often the most vital thing on a set is someone to run around and get all the stuff you forgot or suddenly need.
Dominique Nicolau – Make-up
Paul Lear – Colourist – the technician/artist that grades the footage to give it the look you want. These guys are magicians. He also had a wonderful assistant helping him.
Kim Harvey and Aaron – Kim and Aaron were our contacts at Storage King St Lukes. They provided the location and were unbelievably helpful and accommodating.
Mike, Spencer’s assistant
Ingrid Starnes – My lady did the catering for us. Feeding 12 people three times a day for two days is a real mission.
Sophie Musgrove -Camera Assistant and stills photographer
James Dudley- Camera Assistant and stills photographer
Warwick and Matt at C4Camera for renting us the camera at knock down rates..

Sabe-Vinny the Tailor who let out the suit

Images and Sound for a small discount in grading.

And this wasn’t even a big shoot. It was only two days in one location. Sure it had explosions and weaponry, but that isn’t that complicated. Most of these people either worked for free or at a huge discount. Quite funny and totally unfair to think that often the only person’s name that is remembered is the director huh?

MAKING THE VIDEO

We shot for two days at the Storage King. Each day was over 15 hours long. Everyone worked their arses off and Jay had to repeat every action and sing the song about five hundred times. It was long, hot work in a tin shed in the heat of the day. The less said about this the better except that everyone worked amazingly and as I said, for little money or recognition. I don’t want to say too much more in case the people read it, remember how much work it was and then decide not to do another one!

Photo James Dudley

AND IT ISN’T OVER YET

I then went through and shotlisted all the footage we shot. This is where you describe all the shots you filmed. This takes as long as how much footage you shot times the detail and how long it takes you to describe and categorise what you have. Tip: the more time spent shotlisting the easier the edit.

You then go through the shotlist and marry it up to the storyboard and make what is called a paper edit. I did this and sent all the files and the lists to my editor. He worked on it and I then went down to oversee changes and polishing. My editor Jeremy lives in Cambridge, so this involved a wee bit of driving from Auckland.

The edit is where you make the idea match the music. Finding a good fast editor is vital if you can not do this yourself -- or if you are not good enough. It is also vital to supply them with very detailed information if you have particular wishes.

Once you have an edit done you then go to see the colourist for the grade. This is a truly magical process where you can alter and emphasise colours in your footage. It can be used to draw attention to certain bits of the images and to create tension, drama and mood. There is an awful lot of magic that can be made in the grade. Only problem is that it is very expensive. I was lucky to have one of the world’s best operators of the baselight grading program, Paul Lear so we got good value for the time spent.

You then have to get the video recorded onto the kind of tape that the network requires. You can’t just do this at home. The decks they use at post-production houses cost more than your house. Nearly, they cost heaps anyway.

Then you put the NZ on Air logos on the video and deliver it to the management.

HOW TO TRY TO MAKE ONE YOURSELF:

First you have to find an artist to make a video for. The way music videos in NZ work is that NZ on Air provides $5000 grants to songs it reckons warrant video support as they are likely to receive radio play. NZ on Air gives out 168 of these grants a year in rounds of 28 a time.

There are many ways to find an artist to work with -- -here are two.

1 -- It is possible for anyone to apply for these grants so if you are keen you can find a band you admire – go to their gigs, befriend them on myspace or facebook and ask them if they want a video. You then choose a song and submit it for funding – this is easily done with all information available through the NZ on Air KiwiHits website. Your success chances are greater the better known and more promising the artists’ music is.

2 – Approach existing bands and artists through their management.  Established bands that you like have management and labels that are always on the lookout for fresh directing talent. Show them what you can do, what you have done and what your ideas are. If they think you fit well with the band they will recommend you for a video.

In practice, and in both these scenarios what you need to do is demonstrate that you can deliver a high quality video. This means that you are able to do a lot of the work yourself – as in film or edit it yourself – or that you can convince people to do it for you for free or very cheaply. Because there is no money to be made in music videos. In fact, they will cost you money.

If you have found an act that want you to make a video you then need to come up with a concept that suits the song. Maybe you already have an amazing idea that would work for any song – but in practice it makes more sense to try to come up with a video that speaks to the song, musical style, pace, lyrics, mood and artist abilities. So for example if the song is hectic and is from a band with five extroverted members and the lyrics are all about origami then you are probably going to want to see all the members in some fast cut clip featuring some paper folding. Or maybe the last thing you want to do is be literal. That is the beauty with a video – you can do whatever you want and the act will agree to. And don’t be put off by the complexity and number of people I needed to help me. Sometimes the simplest ideas that are the easiest and cheapest to do are the very best. And in the end that is what music videos are – little capsules that help great ideas spread. Good luck!

Once again -- this isn’t the last word on anything -- it is just a story about what went in to making the vid I made. I hope it might be helpful in some way but it is by no means the only or the ‘right’ way.

Thanks again to all who helped out.

While you’re busy mining, why not look for some vision

First up, I’m not against mining.

I can see the point of mining. I think that it makes a lot of sense to try to explore and exploit the possibilities of our Country if we want to have a wealthy and successful place.

I think that if we are going to use resources it makes more sense to have them ethically mined here, subject to our exacting environmental and labour/employment standards as opposed to using materials that we import and god knows how horribly they are extracted and how horribly the workers are treated.

I must admit I had a tinge of excitement when thinking about mining in NZ. It is the kind of thing that could help us continue to pay for our world class health and education. It could create an economy that might sustain wages so every ambitious kid wouldn’t leave NZ and we wouldn’t just be left with hippies and bums and other conservatives who want to live in a static, arrested world. I reckon that if we don’t try and go forward then our standard of living will go backwards. People who talk about sustainability often miss the fact that we are already slipping so by definition things are not being sustained as it is.

But all this said, I have to say I disagree extraordinarily with the National Government plans for mining. How can they take gold and turn it to shit so regularly? I’m still reeling from their decision not to levy a land tax and am starting to think they may have brown fingers for surely everything they touch turns to shit.

This could have been an enormous opportunity for the country if it was managed in the right way.

Overseas the exploitation of mineral wealth has been used to benefit the countries that are losing it. In Norway they set up a fund that uses the wealth to make investments for the country in order to set up their economy to sustain a time when the wealth runs out. Iran, Venezuela and that communist hotbed Alaska all use mineral wealth to directly help citizens. Alaska pays a dividend every year to citizens and has no income tax. Iran and Venezuela subsidize energy costs at home and channel profits into public services. Alberta in Canada have a heritage fund… The list goes on and as you can see it isn’t just lefties -- -Alaska is the home of Sarah Palin remember.

There are many ways that the shared assets of mineral wealth to be found in a country can be extracted and the country that loses them and perhaps the recreation or natural values of them can be compensated and improved.

Let’s look at what National is proposing. They are offering to mine in high conservation areas that are used by many NZers for recreation. Places like the Coromandel and Great Barrier. They are also proposing to mine in areas that have Kiwi population and ancient Native trees.

What do they offer in return? -- a conservation fund of up to ten million a year for four years -- -and the swapping in to protected lands of 12000Ha that it appears was already going to be protected anyway. They say that the amounts they can get from these areas are in the high billions. 10s of billions of potential wealth to be extracted and in return we get 40 million, some jobs and extra economic activity to add to the tax base. In return the vast majority of profits will go overseas and no provisions will be made to make this resource work for all New Zealanders -- and no planning will go into some kind of replacement plan to make sure the country will be able to mop up after the minerals are gone and have a resilient economy.

This beggars belief. John Key used to work for one of the world’s biggest financial institutions. He understands the idea of managed funds. He understands that economies would be distorted by pure extraction with no plan b. Where is his vision? What are they offering us -- -despoiled shared resources and landscapes for no shared benefit and no plan b? Unbelievable.

Let’s look at what happens when a country takes this approach. There is a country called Nauru.

They had vast stocks of phosphate in the form of Guano -- bird shit. NZ, Australia and Britain mined it all. Problem was their Islands were made of the stuff.

In the 60s and 70s Nauru had the highest per capita income in the world. But if you look at pictures today of Nauru you can see what happened. It ran out because they ran out of island to plunder. They actually mined 63% of the whole place. Removed more than half the country!

Nauru went from one of the highest to one of the lowest incomes as their planning hadn’t worked -- their wealth had gone to NZ, Australia and Britain. They tried to be a tax haven and sell passports as all they knew to do was exploit rather than make, but that didn’t work. In a sad twist the countries that benefited paid an enormous settlement to Nauru to compensate them for ruining their country that Nauru then squandered on bad investments and making a small clique rich. Most recently they have been making money from housing asylum seekers for Australia.The problem was no culture apart from exploiting was fostered.

And you know what the worst thing is -- Nauru did have a fund in place. They had a fund that was at one time worth more than 1 billion. And they lost it all by truly stupid international investments. They didn’t build a local economy. They expected just to be able to exploit resources.  They then lost the settlement. Imagine what happens here without a fund.

And now National want to do just that. They are promising jobs and short term income. Just like Nauru. Here’s a good little doco on the place, poor buggers what a mess:

I don’t know -- i have flown to Christchurch and looked out at the Southern Alps as mountain after mountain went by and thought I’d swap a bit of that for some wealth in the country. We talk about catching up with Oz -- well -- -that will take mining, plain and simple. We haven’t enough room to do it with cows or enough money to do it with R & D. Unless we mine to make the Research and development happen.

I’d be for mining, in principle, if there was such a plan in place. But I can’t believe that National are offering us the worst of all deals.