This week’s Something for the Weekend Music Video is from Plymouth filmmakers GET Crucial and their film for Plymouth band Crazy Arm‘s new single Broken By the Wheel, to be released as a 7 inch limited-edition, on coloured vinyl on Monday, May 25.
We caught up with Chris Southern from GET Crucial Productions to ask about the video
D&CFilm: How did you come to make the film for Crazy Arm?
Richard and I have known the guys in Crazy Arm for years because we’re both quite involved in the local music scene. I’ve played in bands since I was 18 and Rich has had to put up with listening to me. Through years of familiarity we got to know them and we had talked about working with them before. Originally, we were going to do a promo for them as part of our university course, but in the end, there just wasn’t the time. So when Crazy Arm were signed by Xtra Mile, they came to us to put something together.
D&CFilm: What were the ideas behind it and how did you carry them out?
Initially, Crazy Arm were looking to do something that encompassed at least part of their grassroots political leanings.
Crazy Arm are a very strong-minded band, with interesting opinions on a whole range of topics including animal rights, religion, politics, pro-choice and vegetarianism/veganism. This is all well and good, but with a new, emerging band, I think people want to see them. They want to feel more like they know them. ‘
I think what we took away from the initial brainstorming was that they are indeed a ‘grass roots’ band. They have worked very hard to get where they are and have toured the UK and Europe toilet circuits plenty of times over the years.
We were keen to capture the continuing urgency and energry of their live performance and distil that into something that people could really get into. However, it was also about trying to create a strong visual for the more folk and country elements of the song.
Luckily, we live so close to an area of such outstanding natural beauty that we were able to get both the raw energy of the live show by filming in a couple of the small local venues, and highlight the country elements using the rustic charms of the moors.
There’s a kind of old school charm to Crazy Arm as well; they use open tunings, and play with slides, and folk and country rhythms. So something else that we wanted to work in was making the video look old. We wanted to make it look like it had been through the mill a few times. We used a couple 8mm cameras for this, but a lot of it was done in post. Hopefully, it looks as good as the real thing!
D&CFilm: What’s the attraction of doing music videos?
Although this is the first music video of ours that anyone has seen, it is actually the third that we’ve made.
One of which was canned because the band changed members, and the other is on our youtube page, it’s for a song called Pencil Pusher by an acoustic singer-songwriter called Ham on Rye.
I think the best thing about music videos, apart from the fact that we’re music lovers, is that they can be anything you want them to be.
With Broken By The Wheel, it’s basically a calling card for the band; a snapshot of who they are what they are about. But you also have the freedom to use the medium to heighten the mood of the music and that is something that can be very fun.
I also love that you can pick out certain aspects of the song and build a theme around that. Broken by the Wheel is the first video we’ve made commercially and we really do hope to continue and make more.
TOMORROW:
Read the rest of the interview with Chris Southern of GET Crucial on D&CFilm. Darren Johns of Crazy Arm speaks to the People’s Republic of South Devon
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