Behind the Scenes of the Mother Music Video

Hello Fans! 

The music video for the song "Mother" was finally posted and was it a doozy to make. I wanted to give you all a behind the scenes look at how it was done.

The whole video was shot and edited using a Galaxy S10 Plus. We used the Stop Motion Studio app, which is a very handy tool. It organizes the shots in chronological order and any bum shots can easily be deleted from the list of photos. Then the different clips were pieced together with the InShot app. It was all done with the help, talent and dedication of Joe El-Habbaki (Instagram: @Joe_p86).

Initially, we started filming a video that was simply me playing all the different parts and piecing them together. After looking at the videos of me playing the guitar parts, it all felt a little bland and "inauthentic". 

The next day I tried to think about what a common theme was in a mother-child relationship... Cleaning your room. Then the idea of having the room clean itself around me in stop motion came to mind and we decided to do it. What we did not know was how difficult it would really be. 

The first steps were to figure out how long each section of the song was, in order to know how many photos needed to be taken in total and per section, so I would know what guitar part to play as things were happening around me. 

The song is 160 seconds in total. Initially, we thought we needed 10 pictures per second, but we found that it did not give each movement the time it needed to be appreciated. So we decided to shift to 7 photos per second. Thankfully, the Stop Motion Studio app made those changes as easy as touching a button.  The other benefit was we went from needing 1600 photos to 1,120 photos.

Then we did a mini story board and a list of what would happen at each part of the song. These all ended up being approximate, as certain objects cleaned themselves up either faster or slower than we initially thought they would, but we adjusted as needed. 

Then shooting started. The main angle was the one with me in the middle of the mess, but we included some additional close up angles such as the books sliding across and the R2D2 C3PO scene. Some ingenuity with regard to the placement of the tripod had to be used to get the right angles. All the photos had to be taken using a remote clicker, as touching the phone to take photos would cause micro movements and the stop motion would look messy. 

Taking all of these photos took 2 days, probably around 8-10 hours a day. Joe's legs were sore from squatting.  My joints felt like they were rusted sitting in one spot for so long. In the time lapse video above, you can see Joe going back and forth and painstakingly moving the items little by little. 

Interestingly, the most difficult part of the video was the book case. Some books were incredibly uncooperative when it came to staying in place (I'm looking at you "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"). We actually had to resort to taping some of the standing books together and too the bookcase itself to keep them in place. They still remained stubborn. 

Once the photos were all taken, we had to put them together and add the audio. We thought at first that editing the video on a laptop would be better that doing it directly on the phone. We were very wrong. It took hours and hours the next day dealing with problems that were coming up using programs on the laptop. Finally, we decided to use our phones - partly using the integrated video editor on the phone and partly using InShot. The InShot app was also very helpful adjusting the warmth of the live action shots, so they fit with temperature of the stop motion shots. 

And voila, within the hour, the video was complete. 

I've attached two more time lapse videos to this post for your viewing pleasure! 

Thanks for being Fans!