Craigslist Casting And other Stories.

Twelve years ago myself and Steve Hoover were gearing up to shoot our biggest music video to date with Silverstein and Victory Records. The band is still doing great to this day.

During this time, on very small budgets, Craigslist was our friend with casting and locations. Resources were much different than what we have at our disposal in present time.

We also did not have a lot of experience with bigger crews. We were from Pittsburgh, PA, which at this time was NOT known for music videos. It was exciting for us that we were doing something different, but lacked the having a mentor to look up to. We learned a lot through the mistakes we made along the way, which maybe was something that helped in the long run. Those mistakes paved the way for us to become better at the craft.

Speaking of Craigslist, we also randomly found the art director we would go on to work with throughout our time creating music videos. Her name is Merissa Lombardo and she is doing amazing things now. She reached out after seeing our post on Craigslist and it was the start of a wonderful friendship.

We shot the performance in a basement with only stair access. If you look at some of the BTS photos, you’ll see we were not lacking in gear we had to load in/out the narrow stairway.

I don’t remember how we found the bank, but it was a recently closed in the middle of Pennsylvania and they let us do whatever we want.

We always tried to create fun storylines for the videos, or at least something to push and challenge us. At the time, this was the most money, biggest crew and largest amount of talent and extras. Some were friends, but others I have no idea how they heard about the shoot, but we used them!

Once again, this was a shoot we used the 35mm Adaptor (IYKYK)!