Making Soup From a Bag of Screws. Video Production on a Budget.

Making Soup from a Bag of Screws.

Video Production on a Budget

The job involved producing a music video, commissioned by Bonnieramigo Records-Stockholm, for the band Molotov Jive.

·        Background:

In 2006, the ground was just about to fall out from under the music industry. The spectre of massive file sharing meant that revenues were about to be hit hard, and labels were already tightening their belts in regard to promotional spending. Where once, you might expect a budget of $50’000 for the video of a labels new flag ship artist; now you might be lucky with a few thousand at best. Such was the case here. My budget for this shoot was 40’000 Swedish Kronor. ($ 6071 in today’s Aussie money)

·        The Start Point.

As the producer, the first job was to assess the song and create a visual treatment for the video clip. As it was the band’s first real video, I thought it was important to do more of a performance video than some elaborate story led clip. This was the band’s ‘big hello’ so I wanted the audience to get to see who they were, rather than get too arty with the clip.

·       The Song.

The song was called ‘Made in Spain’ and it was spawned by the band’s main man, Anton Annersand. The song was basically a tale of teenage lust and guilt that came about after Anton had slept with his best friend’s girlfriend, whilst they were both on a 3 day college study trip to Barcelona. The song dealt with the lustful holiday romance, and then the awful guilt that they both felt upon returning home and trying to pretend nothing had happened.

·       The Director.

With not much money to play with, I turned to an old friend, Nick Small. Nick was currently a director on TV show, Top Gear, but prior to settling down with wife and kids, he had directed several great videos by Welsh band The Manic Street Preachers, as well as working with Madonna.

Nick decided to do it, simply as he liked the song, and he quite fancied doing a music video again. He offered to do it for $1000.

 The Treatment.

Nick Small made the comment in his usual blunt, northern English way.

 ‘Unless you want to film it in a fucking Swedish tapas bar, I suggest we go to Barcelona; being that it features so heavily in the song.’

He was right of course. The location was integral to the song and how we visually captured it, but it wasn’t reflected in the budget. However, we decided to at least try to work out a way of doing it, and that then gave rise to the key idea within the treatment. A few years earlier a movie came out called, Catch Me If You Can. In the film, Leonardo DiCaprio plays real life 1960’s con-man, Frank Abagnale, who spends a decade pretending to be an airline pilot, a lawyer, and also a surgeon, albeit never having trained to be any of them. The back drop for the film is the 1960’s playgrounds of the rich and famous. The French Riviera, Rome, Paris, and Barcelona, and Steven Spielberg’s cinematography perfectly captures the cool and vibrant spirit of the time.

At the beginning of the film, a 17 year old Abagnale watches a young airline captain walking down his street. The young mums with their children are all looking at him as he passes by in is smart uniform, peak cap on his head, and mirrored aviator shades. Every girl he passes turns and looks longingly at him; and it is the moment that Abagnale, decides that the girls obviously love airline pilots, and he subsequently breaks into Pan American Airlines warehouse and steals some uniforms for himself. What if we could get our hands on four airline captains’ uniforms, and capture the same reactions on the streets of Barcelona?

The Logistics.

So far I had spent $1000 for the director and another $400 for his return flights from Manchester to Barcelona. However, an intensive web search for accommodation had sourced a 7 birth apartment in down town Barcelona for $800 for 3 nights, arriving Sunday and leaving Wednesday. I had also managed to get budget airline flights from Stockholm to Barcelona for around $100 per person. I was now running at $2700.

The plan was to arrive on the Sunday afternoon. On the Monday we would dress the band as handsome young airline pilots and source some locations to film them, and the reactions of the people on the streets. On the Tuesday, we would find a location that screamed BARCELONA, and do a performance shoot of them miming to the song.

The big issues that still needed resolving were the following.

1.     Cameras and filming equipment.

2.     Drums.

3.     Airline Uniforms.

4.     Transport.

5.     Permits to film.

The first two were going to be the hardest to solve. Although Nick Small was able to get a good deal on a high end HD camera in the UK, the cost of the insurance to take it abroad was more per day than the cost of four days entire hire. The only option was to hire one in Barcelona. A web search of Spanish film production companies gave us a great result. Not only did Nick find one with a suitable camera, but the manager turned out to be a guy he had worked with some years earlier. To cap it off, they currently had a shoot on hold, because the lead actor had broken his leg after drunkenly throwing a TV out of a hotel window and falling out with it. The crew were currently being paid to sit around a swimming pool for a few days, and the camera truck was parked up on the director’s driveway. We could have the truck for $1000 for the 2 days, (as it was already paid for) and one of the camera crew was happy to come and help out for $400 cash in the hand. (Running Total $4100)

The next issue was a drum kit. The band were going to bring guitars and cymbals as their main pieces of luggage, but we couldn’t very well afford to ship a drum kit over from Sweden. The solution was social media. I did a social media search for bands in Barcelona and got in contact with a couple of people. Barcelona indie band, Dunno, were great guys. I explained the situation and offered them $150 to borrow their drum kit for an afternoon. Of course, they could come to the shoot and we’d take them out afterwards for dinner and beers. I just had to hope they turned up.

Despite several airlines saying that they would see what they could do; it seemed that 9/11 had put pay to anyone feeling comfortable about loaning out fly-boy uniforms. The solution was to go DIY. All the band members informed me that they had some smart black suit trousers and formal black shoes, so that was the bottom half sorted. $100 in an army surplus store bought me four peak caps, $50 in a sewing and craft store bought me some gold braid, a metre of black felt cloth, and suitable gold plastic cap badges, and another $100 in H&M got me four cheap white shirts and black ties. With the help of someone’s nice mother, the gold braid and black felt was glued around eight pieces of stiff card and made into shoulder epilates, which were fixed to the white shirts with Velcro. Hey, presto, airline pilots.

Transport was solved by the director picking up a Renault crew bus at the airport hire company, for around $400 for 3 days, and delivering it back on his return. This also saved us his taxi fares to, and from the airport.

Running Total. $4900.

We arrived to Girona airport around lunch time on the Sunday, and were at the rental apartment by around 3pm, via the airport shuttle bus. ($20 each, return) Nick, the director arrived at around 8pm, from Manchester, UK, and thankfully the Spanish band guys arrived around 9pm and had some beers and tapas.

On the Monday morning at 10, am, a Mexican guy called Juan Pablo showed up in a massive location truck full of camera gear and lamps. Nick had ear marked a few locations, and after a quick stop at the town hall to pay $50 for our public filming permit, we headed off in to Barcelona. First stop, Los Ramblas, the main tourist area. We then headed to the Sargada Familia, the amazing cathedral designed by Antonio Gaudi, and collared a load of English school girls to be in the video. We also realized that the exterior of our apartment block was designed by Gaudi and decided to try and film as much of his architecture as we could. 

Next stop, the Gaudi Gardens, on the plateau above the city. Upon arriving here, we realized we would need to adopt a guerrilla shoot tactic, as the signs said no filming, and the place was a nightmare to park. We had no option but to park illegally next to a park rangers shed and hope that any wardens assumed it was a park ranger’s vehicle. We had no such luck. Before we had taken the camera cases from the back of our little hire bus, a Guardia cop pulled up on his Harley Davidson; all leather boots, aviator shades, and big mustache. He started to tell us to move our van, but then spotted all the camera equipment.

‘Hey, Gringo’s... You are making movie?’

‘Yes,’ I replied; hoping for some empathy. 

He took off his shades and smiled. ‘You need policeman in your movie?’ he said, half joking.

Fuck it, I thought, ‘Yes! You wanna be in our movie?’

For the next hour we enjoyed a free reign of the amazing Gaudi plateau gardens, accompanied by our new friend, whom we constantly got to walk through shots we were never going to use. We decided to wrap for lunch and asked El Copper if he knew anywhere nice to have lunch?

 ‘You know La Salamanca?’ he said.

After some protracted direction that we were struggling to comprehend, he simply climbed on to his motorbike and beckoned us to follow him. We were then given a police escort through the mad Barcelona traffic to the beach at Barcelonetta, where he peeled off and gave us a blast on his siren as an Adios.

Nick, the directors, luck in procuring all the camera gear so cheaply had meant we had a little more money left than I had expected, so it was decided to treat ourselves to the greatest Paella we would ever eat in our entire lives.

After lunch we resumed our filming and encountered a very comical situation in one of the cities squares. There was another film crew, whom we discovered were from an MTV Europe music show. It wasn’t long before their producer pulled over the guys in the band and asked them to do a link for the show with the pretty Spanish girl VJ. As we walked off, laughing at their Spanish TV debut of, ‘Hey, you’re watching MTV with Maria Hernandez.’ It suddenly occurred to Nick, our director, that the MTV crew maybe hadn’t realized the guys were actually a band?  Having run back and checked it out, the pretty girl presenter ran over to us once more, telling us that they thought the guys were actually airline pilots, but even more brilliant if they were a band, and did they want to do an interview and plug their new single?

Day two was to be a performance shoot, miming to the song. The director had chosen the beach at Barcelonetta, half a kilometre down from the main tourist area to avoid too many locals coming over and trying to get into the shot. We arrived at around 10.30 am and it looked to have been a good call. The location had an amazing panorama of the city behind us, and the whole stretch of beach was practically deserted.

As we set about organizing the shots list and setting up the Spanish bands drums, Johan, the drummer looked up from his kneeling position next to the kit and found himself staring at a wizened and sun tanned set of elderly gentlemen’s vegetables. It transpired that we were on the nudist beach; which accounted for why there weren’t many people there. Some old nudists had wandered over to see what we were doing, and Johan had looked up and almost bumped some wrinkly old man’s wedding tackle with his nose.

By 2 pm it was a wrap. We had filmed the band performing the song about ten times, and then thrown in some surreal shots of them sun bathing in full pilot regalia, in between lots of mustachioed Spaniards constantly trying to get in to the shots. To cap off a fun few days, our new friends from Spanish indie rockers, Dunno, had managed to organize a very short notice gig at a local venue.

With serious hangovers, we flew back to Sweden on the Wednesday lunch time, suffering a massive and dramatic loss of altitude as we hit cold air over the Alps. This was then compounded by Stockholm being in the grip of a Baltic gale and the plane almost barrel rolling before it touched down. Within two weeks we had a finished edit of the video. The editor had graded the digital film to make it look like wide-screen soft focus 35 mm, and it totally captured the feel we had been hoping to achieve. A few days later, the head of A&R at the record label, called me up in a panic.

‘How much money have you spent on this?’ he said nervously.

‘Less than $6000’ I told him, ‘And we still had enough left over to spend $500 on lunch at La Salamanca, and then get roaring drunk on mojitos at the end of the shoot,... all on your budget.’ 

I knew he would think I was joking.

The record label’s promo people continued the trend. No one could believe that we had flown seven people to Spain, accommodated them all in a beautiful city centre apartment, fed and paid them, and rented a huge Ghostbusters truck with a million dollars worth of film equipment and crew. We had also delivered a music video that looked as if it had cost ten times what it actually did. In addition, we had all enjoyed a nice sunny working holiday in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, eaten like kings, drank like lords, and all out of a tiny budget.

If there is a lesson to be learned here, it’s that the idea and the vision are much more important than the budget. Of course, there is no point in trying to shoot a Spielberg epic on only a few thousand dollars, because you are always going to end up with a mess. However, a strong central idea and a resourceful mind set can often buy you much more.