Making of...: Kamora - Difficult (music video)

In December I was commissioned to create a music video for Glaswegian band Kamora.

We talked over some ideas, and for budget reasons we decided to keep the video straight forward - no actors, no locations. There was to be a performance aspect, but with the last video they did being the band performing the song in a nicely lit rehearsal space I didn’t want to just repeat that.

I'd noticed they had been updating their Instagram stories and using filters to age the videos so I suggested we run with an aesthetic like that, except that I'd actually film it on an old camcorder using DV Tape, and they were in to it.

A friend lent me their camcorder, an old Panasonic NV-GX7.

After the shoot - and because nothing is ever straightforward - I should not have been surprised when the camcorder chewed the tape up. Thankfully it was loose, and a quick wind on with a wee screwdriver sorted it right out! That was until it happened again immediately, and jammed the whole thing and then finally snapping when I tried to take the tape out. Cool.

I took a closer look, and the tape was wrapped around a cog. I tried to pick it out with some tweasers but they weren't long enough to get to the tape so next, because I am a genius, I repurposed a couple of pricision screwdrivers and wrapped some sellotape around them. This allowed me to reach in, and clasp the tape with extra grip, and ease it out gently. That section of tape was completely ruined so there was no point in even trying to salvage it. I was just happy the camcorder might actually work again.

As is expected with old technology, modern tech has doing it's best to leave it firmly in the past and connection the DV out to my laptop wasn't as easy as just putting the wire in. My mid-2015 Macbook Pro doesn't have a firewire port, so I spent a chunk of money on a couple of adaptors so I could import the footage via Thunderbolt.

Once the tape footage was on my hardrive, I thought I'd have a go at glitching it. I imported the video as raw data in some audio software, and applied a bunch of effects to it. This resulted in a stream of glitches which I screenshotted below.

Unfortunately, the video file was too unstable and wouldn't re-open in my editing software and due to the bands budget I didn't spend time exploring how I could make it work, but I'll probably do it on some other project another time because I love how it looks.

I think the video is finally been released tomorrow, so I'm just going to quietly leave it here.