Secret & Whisper

This video holds a special place in my heart. Me and Steve really enjoyed the song and pitched a weird idea we had. If you asked me today, I don’t remember what we pitched or even how we made sense of it. But we had a good relationship with the label and gave us a lot of leeway because of the foundation we built together from past efforts.

This was before Red or Arri were even close to being in the picture. Me and Steve found ways to make magic on our old Sony HVX cameras. But I cannot ignore how much time we spent with Animal and Allan Stallard on post. Every time we zoomed into one of the little doors opening, not only did we have to track the shot but there was a lot of cleanup. Behind each of those opening doors were our crew using arms and legs to open and close them throughout the performance. We also made a comically big ring light you’ll see in the photos below. 

We made mistakes for sure. We shot the band performance on a black background, because we didn’t know we were going to track them into the door opening shots. So we had to find any texture we could in the performance shots to track them into the gear shots.

But the set was my favorite. We worked with our longtime friend Merissa Lombardo on this. We rented the top floor of an old VFW in Braddock, PA for a week for a couple hundred dollars to build the set. Downstairs were a bunch of regulars enjoying stale cigarettes, cheap beer and good conversations.