Lou Z - 'Before You Go' music video

I had an absolute blast working on this one! For this I did it all; concept development, styling, location scouting, shooting and editing. It was great to be able to get stuck right in. 

Lou Z came to me with the idea of a 'home holiday video' style aesthetic and an eighties VHS camera to use, so we went from there... 

I liked the idea of incorporating the funfair due to all the lights and colours, I imagined the spinning carousels and carnival elements to translate beautifully to the grainy VHS footage and I lovelovelove how that turned out. 

The song captured the essence of a bad event approaching and the anticipation of that in the back of your mind so I wanted to create something involving dark and light to represent this. From here I took it further by creating ' a dark world' and 'a bright world' which is how life could be viewed depending on what you're going through. The same world could seem very bleak or completely euphoric, determined by whatever stage the 'bad event' is at the time. 

It's a reminder that the dark and light is in all of us and it's how we choose to navigate our thoughts and emotions that determines how we deal with these times. Despite these elements, I wanted a continuous flow of imagery that starts at a much slower pace at the beginning, building up to a more hectic feel, before coming right back down at the end; a prompt to keep flowing and embrace the highs and lows, changes and monotony. 

The mix of media really helped me to convey this; the juxtaposition of grainy VHS and vibrant digital imagery made these two worlds (or two visions of the same world) seem miles apart. 

To keep the home video style authentic, I used a hand held filming style for the majority of the shots, only using a tripod for the digital version of the chorus footage. This also increased the jump between the two worlds, crossing them over with some hand held digital footage of the fairground rides near the end. The most difficult part was to imitate the wobbly 'dad style' home video filming; obviously the instinct is to make it as stabilised as possible! I made sure to take MUCH more footage than I needed and I started the camera before I intended to film. Many of these 'pre filming' bits of footage were actually used in the end, as they really captured the 'wobbliness'. Plus, the old camera was rather large and heavy, so that helped too. 

You can check out the final video here: 
https://en.nordiksimit.org/video-premiere-lou-z-before-you-go/

Until the next one,

​Effi xx