It's been a week since the shoot for my debut video 'Thousand Words' wrapped. I cannot tell you how happy I am with the hard work and dedication of the crew and my fabulous leading lady, and the fact that we are even shooting a video for this, my most personal piece of work, makes me all the more proud.
Yesterday I ventured to director/dear friend/adopted sister Milli Lo's house to meet up with the crew and watch all the footage that was shot, a kinda raw 'premier' if you will. I have to say, I am extremely happy with what we have, both for the video and the behind the scenes feature that we are planning along side, shot by Will Oakley, a comedy genius in the making with his sidekick and our sound engineer Tom Fuller providing us with all sorts of bizzare insights into what we were doing on set. More of that to come...
For now I will go back to the first day of the shoot, our exterior shots in central London. Wow, what a cold day it was! Chantal and myself arrived fashionably late as we stopped off at our old place of work to see our make up and hair stylist Becky Hall who sadly couldn't join us that day. After saying my apologies, we cracked on straight away with our first shots! First location, Soho Square!
Now, neither Chantal or myself are trained actors nor have we had vast experience infront of the camera (I gained some in my recent trip to HK where I met up with film maker extrordinaire Maria Tran as she was filming her own project, I ended up on camera quite a bit and y'know, I quite liked it!) so we were a tad nervous to be honest! But knowing this amazing woman for nearly seven years and having a friendship that seems much longer made acting with her so natural and right. Chantal knows the song almost as intensely as I do and I didn't want anybody else for the project but her.
Even the director was pleased with how quickly we bagged our first few scenes and how well the day was moving. Onto some solo shots and my first 'singing' scenes...
My first solo shots included a lot of static 'moody' scenes of myself staring into the distance, looking pensive and even with a crew of ten around me, two with cameras, I found it easier than I thought. Might be because I intentionally envisaged a Tony Leung Chiu Wai MV in which he stands there doing next to NOTHING. Great song though.
Next were the singing shots. Again, this was all new to me, being filmed, sound technician Tom next to me with my song playing out the speakers of an ipod dock, but I knew what I wanted and I just started performing...
After lunch at a nice (but fairly expensive) restaraunt in Chinatown, we headed back to the park in Soho Square for the 'time lapse' sequence. I fear these words now! The plan was originally to sit there for an HOUR and not move, or, if I moved at all, VERY VERY slowly so when the footage was sped up it would have the desired effect that Milli wanted.
Here's where I feel I failed a little, coupled with my gung ho 'I've never done this before but I CAN' attitude and the feezing cold weather I feel I bit off a bit more than I could chew. After around five minutes my eyes were streaming as I wasn't blinking properly and my hands were starting to turn blue! All in all I ended up shooting about 30 minutes worth of footage. I hope Milli can use it, I wouldn't want that ordeal to be in vain!
That done and a warm drink for everyone we continued to get a few more singing shots and some more 'couple shots' of Chantal and myself. It was getting a little late in the day, the temperature was dropping further and we were losing light, but we all battled on regardless.
We finally wrapped in the early evening and had a group photo (minus our awesome runner Ellie who had to, well, run off!). This was a rare chance to catch our fantastic commercial and production photographer Chris Lee on camera as he was doing a stunning job of snapping the entire day. I think on day one alone he took in excess of 1200 photos! All the pictures that grace this page right now are his work.
I would also like to thank the rest of the cast and crew at this point, my co-star Chantal, production assistant (and StreetFighter 4 expert) Seun, Will, Tom, Ellie, Chris Lee, our amazing and non-stop hard working cinematographer Luc, Becky for making us look good and of course Milli who was astounding in all aspects of the production. You can direct me anytime, Ah Mui!
For more insight into the first day from the directors perspective, head on over to Milli's page and check out her side of the story (I don't know where the story of me getting lost halfway through the day came from though....).
Thanks for reading folks, and that was just the first day! I had such an amazing time working on this production and I cannot wait to share the finished product with you all.
For now, please don't forget to head on over to www.reverbnation.com/cdgmusic to hear my music and for some more updates on what I'm up to!
Day Two and Three recap to follow shortly...
Signing out,
ChrisG
Nice nice! keep up the good work Mr G! :)
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