With this many years in the business, we are always looking for ways to challenge ourselves and further push the limit of what we as a production company can offer to our clients. Recently, we had the opportunity to do exactly that, when we were brought on to help produce a music video for Samantha Gracie, a local singer/songwriter.

Up until now, we have had very limited experience shooting music videos, which is why this project excited us so much. Even with our enthusiasm, we knew we had to cover all our bases twice to make sure that inexperience didn’t cost us on the day. Thorough planning was going to be our insurance policy and clear communication on deliverables was going to set us up for success.

Like any project, we toyed with many different visions. We allowed open conversation and encouraged all ideas to be vocalized. This led to authentic progression, and allowed for important issues to be addressed. These types of conversations actually led Samantha to change the song she wanted the video centred around as she started to feel her dream for the video could become realized. This song meant something to her, and when we heard it, everything seemed to click. A song about grief, and profound love touched us all, and we wanted to give it visual life. From there we had weekly calls leading up to the shoot to continue to iron out the scheduling, wardrobe and talent needed. This kept everyone informed and excited for shoot day.

Once the story board was made, the song was solidified and the shot list was created, we began scouting locations and talking time constraints. The nature of this video would need one location that could double as present day footage and flashback footage. Time wise, we would need to be able to shoot with full light, sunset, and blue hour (the hour directly after sunset). In the end, these needs lead us to decide on shooting at Conrad’s Beach, NS. At this location we could capture all three times of day with little travel, and would work perfectly with our timeline jumping. Days before shoot, the team and Samantha checked out the location, took reference photos and even further tightened our timeline for the day. The success of this one day shoot absolutely depended on understanding what we were up against when it came to the sun setting.

On the day, we felt excited, confident and ready to go. We were lucky to have almost perfect weather (a bit windy for our talent!) and a spectacular sunset. This sunset was what most of the production was relying on. It’s a song about love, loss, and memories and as visual artists we knew lighting would be the key to driving these messages through. It was the change in light, the moving into sunset, and then dusk, that really helped tell the story. Now the rest was up to us.

We moved forward using natural light almost exclusively, (only adding a reflector board for a bit of return on a few occasions.) and shot with our newly acquired Sony A7SII, on our Ronin 2 Gimbal, and our new Sony 16-35mm Cine lens. We must say - the A7SII blew us away with its dynamic range RAW profile. With all the planning that had gone into production and this reliable gear we were able to accomplish the entire shoot in less than 4 hours.

It is always very humbling to be around gifted performers, and in this case we were working with a multi-talented performer in Samantha Gracie. Samantha had just recently written and recorded the song, so her delivery was heartfelt and authentic. Being a part of another artist’s process is inspiring, and opened new avenues for us production wise. As always she was a dream to work with and we felt like it was a total collaboration.

Being able to accomplish this shoot with such a small team, during COVID times is something we are very proud of - and we can say, we love the final product.

We can’t wait to work on more projects like this and continue growing our skillset.