Sunday, February 22, 2009

Architects Unite!

My first music video for Francis Friday happened quite by accident. It was directed by my good friend Chris Bagnall in the sunny streets of Greenpoint, shot in October of 2006 and edited and completed in March of 2007.

It started out as a photo shoot for the myspace page I was setting up. My beard was particularly thick and I wanted an old-timey look with bowler hat and dark-pressed suit. Chris, ever-prepared, brought along his high definition video camera to get shots of me playing some of my songs live on the streets of waterfront brooklyn. I played about 4 songs, one of them being Architects Unite, from the Streets Are For Keeps album.

A few months later I asked him to burn me a dvd of some of the songs we recorded and he invited me over to pick it up. As we were going through the raw footage, Chris came upon the idea to make a music video out of one of the songs and post it on youtube. We picked Architects Unite for its catchy choruses and proceeded to paste the best shots together to form an entertaining 3 minute collage. However something was missing, and I decided it would be great to put in some actual footage of architects, buildings and vintage skyscraper construction footage from old New York. I went down to the local video store, Photoplay, and picked up a few movies and documentaries I thought would work.

We had so much fun putting this together and I hope you like it (the silly dog just happened to be walking by with his owner as we were shooting). Incidentally we both spelled 'Architects' wrong on the opening titles (and the youtube posting itself). I know perfectly well how to spell architect and I'm not sure how the mistake wasn't caught earlier. Oh well. The video compression is a little pixelated, but Chris' old computer died on him and the original file has unfortunately been lost.

Enjoy!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow, you have been blogging :)
where is the video? i am dying to see....x-moush

Anonymous said...

ooh and love the beard! very a la phoenix -moush

chickytava said...

This is Sarah's friend, Kit (met you at the wedding happy hour). I love this video! Victorian era meets architecture in the midst of a pop song... couldn't get better than that.