She Opens Roses

I was contacted in mid-March by Johnny Stokes (aka Blue Light of Dawn, Golden Ratio), an unsigned Electronica musician working in Ireland who'd seen some of my music video edits and wanted to commission a specially-shot one for one of his own songs. After some discussion, we settled on the ambient piece "She Opens Roses". My pitch for this was of two people -- a former couple -- who have split up, and now neither of whom can fully experience life. The woman is in a lush environment full of natural life but she can't appreciate the colour of it any more. The man has colour in his life, but it's in a sterile cityscape where he cannot relate to the people around him. It's only when the man acknowledges his love for the woman that both of them are able to experience life completely.

We location scouted and filmed in Central London (on 30th March and 1st April respectively), and then did the same for a variety of locations in South Wales (on 13th-14th March). This is the first video I've worked on where we couldn't accurately storyboard beforehand. The Wales work involved finding locations where the lines (horizons, paths, trees, etc) could match the London lines, and then filming lots of material in the hope that it could be matched.

Editing took nearly six days, largely because of the involved nature of the "ghost people" scenes, and the customised crossfades (intended to show how neither character was really out of the other's mind) which had to be individually created through a number of specially created masks. As ever, footage was recorded on a Panasonic GS500, edited in Ulead's Video Editor package, with various image manipulation done in Photoshop.

The musician decided in the end not to use the video, but was kind enough to give me permission to use it in my portfolio. More examples of my work can be found here in my You Tube account, and a DIVx, higher-res version of the video can be downloaded from:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4F99FAEJ

Further examples of work (both audio and visual) by Blue Light of Dawn can be found at:

http://myspace.com/bluelightofdawn
http://cdbaby.com/cd/goldenratio

For more information and images about the making of this video, visit http://www.redbluegreenproductions.com/

Category:

Music

Tags:

• music
• ambient
• electronica
• romance
• wales
• london
• thames
• roses
• love
• sadness
• missing
• heart