The Way Young Lovers Do – My Toys Like Me from Luke Hagan on Vimeo.
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Luke Hagan picked up the University of Exeter Award for Best Student Film One Year On, at Two Short Nights and his film was One Year On shown at the D+CFilm Open Screening. Here is his latest offering, in the form of a music video for My Toys Like Me (from their forthcoming debut, no less). We got in touch to find out about the making of the video
How did you get the job?
I had seen My Toys Like Me play several months before, and become an instant fan. I was looking to build up my showreel after I finished university I thought I’d do some music videos, and My Toys Like Me where perhaps the first group I got in touch with. I just emailed them, on the off chance they’d let me do it. And they said yes, which was hugely exciting for me. It was also a bit of a shock because I had no real music promo experience, and hadn’t shown them a a single second of my previous work.
How did you get the ideas?
The idea was originally going to be to have a young man watching and interacting with a projection of his girlfriend. I had a long time to develop the idea, because I had a time set aside to film, and a couple of months before then to think about what I’d do. As a result I had a lot of time to think through the idea, and change it. I began to consider the logistics of the original idea, and decided that it was too difficult to do without a budget, so it began to change, until I came up with this. The idea all along was that the projection represented the memories, like a home movie. In the end I guess I took this to its logical conclusion with the memories literally replaying across the young man’s face. Actually, that might not be the logical conclusion, but I thought it would look cool, and that’s important too.
How long did it take you to make?
I filmed the images for the TV on a few days over the course of a couple of weeks. The actual shoot was just one day, but I’d spent a couple of weeks getting everything to together and working out exactly what I needed doing. Editing took about a 10 days because I was learning a lot of the techniques as I went along, and spent a lot of time trying out different ideas and looks to see what worked and what didn’t.
What were the technical issues you faced?
I think the biggest issue was the green screen on the TV. Lighting it was difficult, I wasn’t able to use a back light inside the TV, there was barely enough room for my head in there let alone lights. We kept getting shadows across the screen, which would have made it very difficult to edit. I got around it by being very careful with the shots I used for green screening, but even then some of them caused a lot of problems. In the end most of these problems disappeared once the final effects were added to the footage. Getting the image to follow the movements of the TV was not as tricky as I thought it would be, although I did try and move the TV as little as possible during filming, because I couldn’t see any point in making editing any harder than it already was.
Not having any budget was a bit of a problem too.
What next?
I’m working on a music video for another young up and comer. It should be a bit more upbeat than this one, but then that’s how they all start out in my head.
Posted by Cptn
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[...] Year On film was shown at the D+CFilm Open screening at said Exeter film festival. Pop on over to D+CFilm to find out about the making of the video, where Luke claims his next flick will be ‘bit more upbeat than this one’. A likely [...]