In the realm of creative expression, music videos offer a unique playground for artists and filmmakers alike. It’s a space that’s perfect for collaboration. We’ll peel back the layers of creativity, showing how we brought the video for "YNGR" to life on a shoestring budget.
The artist high on you., our friend Reid, approached us to film a music video for his new song YNGR. The song is a melancholic letter to the artist’s younger self. It talks about growing pains and striking a balance between chasing ambition and feeling comfortable being oneself.
Confronting the Constraints
This project suffered from the same thing that many personal projects do: having little to no budget. This meant our first problem to solve was resource allocation. Some expenses take priority; having a crew and camera package is a pretty essential starting point, which meant that things like grip and electric, locations, and art all had to take a pretty significant hit.
Our main tactic was to focus on free over ideal. Reid’s house became a primary filming location because we didn’t need a location fee or a permit. The art, props, and other locations all came about by calling in favors from Reid’s friends (and friends of friends).
Preproduction: Visual Identity
Pre-production is critical for all projects, but especially so for low-budget music videos as it allows for time optimization, problem anticipation, and most importantly, smart allocation of scarce resources. At each step of pre-production, we were better able to understand and refine the creative vision.
Once we were clear on our limitations, we dove headfirst into brainstorming. We listened to the song dozens of times and chose to base the video’s visual identity on three primary emotions: isolation, nostalgia, and a sense of drowning.
A Sense of Drowning
There’s this part in YNGR where Reid stops singing and the instruments float and meander. It felt inevitable that we had to submerge ourselves for this, because in that particular part of the song, it gives the listener a sense of being underwater.
This scene was crucial in representing drowning in a literal sense, so we allocated a healthy chunk of our resources to the gear we’d need: underwater housing for the camera, an M18 HMI light source, and a friend’s pool.
The treatment called for Reid to fall off of a roof, directly match-cutting to falling into the pool. Once we were underwater, we played around with slow, disorienting shots that matched the music.
Transforming a House into a Canvas
Two of the most visually striking scenes were shot in Reid’s small bedroom. How could we make this room interesting?
In one corner, we piled dozens upon dozens of pink balloons, lit from beneath with tube lights from Quasar Science. The room had chunky blinds that we used to help shape the light from outside, where an Aputure 300d sat parked on a c-stand. This scene was inexpensive to make and evoked an abstract sense of drowning.
When we wrapped on the balloon scene, we flipped the room 90 degrees to the polaroid wall. This wall was an intimate display of real, personal moments from Reid’s life. We wanted this scene to feel dark and moody, as if the artist was confronting memories in a bad dream.
We lit the scene primarily through the window with the blinds angled to help shape the light, which helped to keep the contrast high and the shadows long. This scene had emotions of loneliness and a brutal nostalgia, bordering on regret.
We moved 15 feet to the living room and used legos and a Nintendo 64 to build on the sense of childhood nostalgia. A handheld sprinkler's soft rain drizzle further enriched the ambiance. It was exciting to see just how different looking three scenes could be, all within a few feet of each other.
Rooftop Falling
The roof was another free location that we could use at Reid’s house that happened to have the perfect angles for the match cut to the drowning sequence.
Safety is important, but so is getting the shot. So we met that idea in the middle by throwing a large crash pad on top of a car and placing two spotters at the base of the car. After some careful spotting, we got the shots we needed!
Staying Resourceful
Though the estimated cost of production touched $12,000, by being resourceful, we kept expenses to about $1,500. We didn’t know it at the time, but this fun little collaboration of a video is what would eventually lead to the founding of 1:1 Studios.
We still keep that resourceful spirit alive, which helps us stretch our clients’ budgets as far as possible.
See more of the BTS Process:
