The Devil Wears Prada

Alright back to some music video stories (w/Steve Hoover). This one today is the first time we worked with The Devil Wears Prada (Rise Records). This is as they were starting to really pick up tracktion - they might have still been in High School as well. But we knew the band was going to start to make waves so we put some muscle behind the shoot.

So the idea was creating a unique set inside of an abandoned church using trees and leaves. The performance and concept both took place here. So…back in the day we had a good relationship with the mayor of Braddock, an old part of pittsburgh that was the hot spot back in the day because of the steel industry. But as they went away it became a ghost town. You could freely walk into abandoned houses and see the ghost of what was once there. Many times it seemed as if people just picked up and left without taking much of their belongings. But then the Mayor, John Fetterman, who is now a United States Senator, worked incredibly hard to revitalize the area. I knew people who would buy full houses for $5-10k and slowly the area started to change. It was beautiful.

Ok but back to the story. We asked the Mayor if we could use an old abandoned church for a few days and he agreed. The church had a door that locked but there were plenty of ways to get in otherwise. We worked with our amazing art director at the time, Merissa Lombardo, to create the set. This place had no power so when we got to lighting on the day we had probably a 3 ton grip truck and a truck mounted generator. As you can see from the set photos, we had a fair amount of lighting.

So on the day we did the band performance first. We shot everything on the HVX using a 35mm adaptor. For anyone too young to remember what this was - ugh. It was an additional rig you mount to your camera that allowed for you to use cinema lenses. BUT - it was a slow process, heavy and sucked up light. If you know, you know.

Band performance went a little long and we were set to shoot the concept after that. Our ‘talent’ was a small kid that Steve had known. Little did we know he was invited to a sleep over that night and that caused a huge meltdown. He did not want to be there, especially with us running a bit behind. We knew in that moment we could not use him so we let him and his mom go. Over the next hour we were all trying to figure out what we could do.

I called up my cousin and asked his parents if he wanted to be in a music video and if we could pick him up early in the morning the following day to film with him for the day. He was excited so we solved one part of the problem. But we had all of our lighting set and it took a long time to get everything set. The solution? Me and Steve slept in the church overnight to make sure the equipment was safe. In an abandoned church. The next morning we got my cousin and finally started the shoot.