We spent a fun day shooting at Street Studios in East London with great young artist Liv Lovelle for her new track Special. After a couple of months chatting with Twin about the possible music videos we could work with them on Special was the perfect fit.
What struck us about the track? Liv's beautiful soulful voice! And we weren't the only ones, the track was picked up by Spotify for their great playlist 'Sweet Soul Sunday' which currently features Special along with tracks from Leon Bridges, Sade and Jorja Smith.
With the acoustic feel of the soulful track we really wanted to create a stripped back video - which took us down a route of giving it a real behind-the-scenes feel. We wanted to show Liv with different styling and in front of different backdrops, but at the same time rather than just having classic heavily stylised visuals we wanted to show the framework of the video, so that included showing the crew, lighting, backdrop stands and everything in between! That way we could contrast the behind the scenes feel with more fashion editorial style shots.
As Liv is such a strong character and incredibly watchable, one of the key things we did is make use of mini-dv camera footage in between using our main camera (Sony FS7) to enable us to shoot on the hoof and catch more varied shots really quickly. As much as 4K 100 frame-per-second footage shot on a gimbal gives you great shots, with lens changes and lighting change, we made use of bits of down time to capture Liv with this smaller camera. We think this adds a really nice, personal element to the video and the fact the we had such a fun time on set hopefully comes through in the final video.
We were in very good company at Street Studios!