Pop Will Eat Itself – ‘English Civil War’ Music Video

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Pop Will Eat Itself – ‘English Civil War’ Music Video

This is the music video we shot and edited for Pop Will Eat Itself. We felt privileged to be asked to make a video for such an influential and successful band. We came up with a few different ideas and concepts that we pitched to the band and, as is the case with most of these types of videos, they chose the one which was potentially the hardest to execute. We love a challenge and are always trying to push ourselves to make bigger and better videos, so it was something we grabbed at with both hands; making a tv fly!

Firstly finding a tv that looked the part was tricky. There is an old tv and electronics store in Brighton who were very helpful and had the type of unit we were looking for but it came with a catch. It only had an aerial, so there was no easy way to plug a dvd player in to it so that we could play back the footage of our actor as the politician. This meant a lengthy chat in our local Maplins, where one of the very knowledgeable shop assistants managed to point us in the right direction to a thing called a modulator which basically takes the signal from the dvd player and forces it down the aerial and into an old tv. After an hour of plugging in leads and testing settings we finally got it working! First challenge overcome!

Next, we shot all the scenes with our main actor, Phil. To get the point of view of the tv when it was chasing him, we enlisted the services of DoubleXAir and their incredible drone. Every time we work together we are blown away with the results and both Jon and Adam were very creative and helpful on the day. We went out to the fields near Whitehawk and up the an area near Brighton racecourse which has a brilliant view over the city and added some grandeur to our end scene.

With everything shot, we now had to get the actual tv to fly. With our makeshift green screen set up, we shot the tv on its own and put it over the video in Final Cut Pro X (our editing software). It meant we had a very intensive crash course on keyframing, which is a very time consuming and frustrating process when you are learning, but we feel that the results work well, and it doesn’t distract too much away from the feel and narrative. Taking in to consideration blurring the tv to match the shot, adding shadows on the ground and movement was such a long and arduous task but one we loved, and we are proud that the band were happy too.

Enjoy!

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