A friend and I entered a competition where we were randomly paired up with a band and asked to create a video clip within 72 hours. We heard the song for the first time on Friday night and after having a chat to the band and finding out the kind of clip they wanted, we went about brainstorming the clip well into the night and completing some of the pre-production. Around 65 hours later, we produced, shot, edited and colour graded a 4 minute 20 second video clip having had about 8 hours of sleep in entire time. In the end we didn’t win any of the prizes on offer but I thought it was a pretty damn awesome effort for just the two of us (considering some other teams had 8 or 9 members). Additionally, being called Team MacGyver wasn’t a coincidence, we didn’t have any of the fancy gear that most film crew own, just a nice camera (the Canon 5D MkII), lenses and a bit of ingenuity. For example, we wanted to shoot 2.35:1 but since the camera shot 16:9, we ended up having to put a piece of plastic with boundaries drawn onto it to be able to frame the video properly. MacGyver would have been proud of us.

Here’s the final product! The band loved the clip and while there are a couple of small technical things that we still notice, it was a pretty amazing learning curve for two guys who’d never shot a video clip before and we’re pretty happy with our efforts.