Turning a disaster around, with a little help from my friends.
- countblastula
- Oct 30, 2021
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 5, 2021
This is the tale of "An Itchy Finger", a cursed music video project that was sabotaged by a ghost in the machine...but turned out great in the end.
Inspired by a Halloween themed Dizzee Rascal video, my brother Joe came up with the idea for a music video wherein our drummer, Pete, was terrorized in various over-the-top gorey ways by the rest of the band. I liked the idea, but thought that the gorey element should be more stylized than realistic for 2 reasons:
A realistic approach would be more difficult and require a lot of makeup, prosthetics and effort, and:
I thought a stylized approach would be more creative and might make the video's aesthetic more unique.
Test footage of the gore effects: a painted a green gash superimposed with red colourised running water from a stream.
I had the idea of filming waves splashing, and colouring the footage red to make blood splatters. This approach would avoid the logistics of cleaning up lots of fake blood if nothing else. This idea informed the rest of the effects, and the general aesthetic I wanted to go for.
At this time I had a young baby who needed constant pushing around in a pram during their naps, so during these wandering hours I listened to the song on headphones and ran ideas around in my head until I had a complete "plot" formulated. I then went to work storyboarding it, like any sensible filmmaker should.
It was an ambitious project requiring 3 separate shoots:
The main "plot" - Pete getting terrorized by shadowy figures in his dreams and as a result wanting some home protection
The "sub-plot" - Jodie, our bassist, as an evangelical TV gun salesman, which required a green screen, and finally
The band playing live and getting...well - watch the video if you haven't already.
After storyboarding in my sketchbook, I wanted to translate my ideas to the rest of the band, so made an animatic, which is an animated storyboard, set to the music. It tends to get people on board with the vision if you have time to make one, as well as help plan camera movements.
Frames from the animatic: Pete's first intruder nightmare - a lost scene from the original video.
We filmed the video over Christmas and New Year of 2018-19 in and around Lanark. The evening before filming I was up late making prop guns out of corrugated cardboard I'd taken out of someone's recycling bin.
Jodie in some test footage with the main prop gun.
Pete's parents had generously donated their house as the main shoot location and made themselves scarce for the day while we went through the shotlist. We started with Jodie's green screen shots as they required daylight, then filmed Pete's scenes. The choice to have the intruder's mysterious third hand flick Pete's nose was a nod to The Naked Gun 2 1/2. Rachel Campbell, Pete's co-star, couldn't make the first day's filming, so her stand in was an inflatable love doll with her wig on.
Me filming Pete being tormented by a shadowy intruder with a fork (Joe).
A week or so later we were in Pete's inlaws' farm shed in freezing temperatures, trying to get cold hands to co-operate and play guitar whilst we filmed the band scenes of the video. Our pal Pete Smith filmed the shots as I needed to be in front of the camera. The scene was lit by the headlights of a farm vehicle (a telehandler I believe) shining through the window. The gun firing effect was created by taping my torch on "strobe mode" to the side of the prop.
Pete, whisking an intruder.
Then, after new year, we returned to Pete's parents house, this time with Rachel, and filmed the remaining shots with her. Rachel filmed the scene of Joe and I being revealed, and I believe some of her makeup was used to draw the iris onto the stunt eye (boiled egg).
Rachel, being slain by an intruder, many times to get the perfect shot. We used two knives - a real one for static shots, and a cardboard one painted silver for the throat cut.
When I returned home to Eigg, I spent many hours filming waves trying to get good sprays of foam to use for the blood effects.
The edit proceeded slowly as it was a big job. The footage first needed to be colour graded, to give it the particular filmic look I was after. Then I edited each of the plot threads separately, before editing them together with the music. I then worked on the effects, which are a bit of a drain on computing power, so best left til last.
Pete with a "green screen" eye socket, ready for the computer magic.
At the end of the video there was some foley work required. Foley is creating a soundscape retrospectively for film. In this case I needed a gunshots, screaming and the sound of guitars being dropped and people falling over. I wanted to make all the sounds myself, rather than using a sound library, so I went into the church (empty) next door with firecrackers, guitars and amps and spent a few hours making bangs, dropping guitars and screaming bloody murder.
All was going well. I showed Joe a rough cut, he was happy, I was nearly done with the edit.
Then external hard drive I was working from broke and I lost everything.
I sent the drive to a specialist to try and recover the footage, but it was too corrupted to retrieve. I went into shock, then into mourning. I couldn't quite except that all the months of work had been taken away in one unspectacular moment - of plugging in a hard drive to be greeted with a little computer message: "Drive not recognised". I lamented the loss of scenes I had been so familiar with and so proud of, like the intruders, with only their breath visible, sneaking into the house, or Pete pulling a gun on them which turns into a banana.
A lost scene from the original video - Pete's home protection gun turns into a banana in a nightmare.
This was many levels of bad news. Not only was it a massive blow to me personally, and to everyone who had been involved in the project, but also the video was due to be released on Halloween of 2019 as a promotion for our upcoming album release. So as not to remain bogged down and depressed about it, I had to draw a line under the project and try to move on. We needed a music video, so I conceived a less ambitious concept, one that I thought was achievable in a relatively short time, and that became the video for "We Own the Sun", released with the album launch in February 2020. (See Blowing up a tree).
Take two...
After the release of the album, I was pressed by the band to see what could be salvaged of the An Itchy Finger project. The only raw footage that remained was the last day's shoot - the day when Rachel was on set.
The first bit of good news was that the colour settings were still saved in my colour grading software (davinci resolve), so after importing all the footage I could render it out just as it was before. Then I found that I had the entire final band scene saved on my other computer desktop, in full HD. I'd rendered it to watch as reference when I was doing the foley work. OK, things are looking up. I was still missing an important element: Jodie's gun shop. But then I remembered I'd whatsapped some clips to Jodie for him to see. I no longer had them, but he did, and although it wasn't all of the scenes, they were definitely usable. OK, now we're getting somewhere.
A recovered missing scene which was ultimately cut from the final video as it referred more to the old plot.
There was a good amount of footage now recovered, but there were still huge holes in the original story. I thought maybe there was a chance of tweaking things to make a new version of the plot, but it would require shooting some new footage. In the original story, Pete was having nightmares after watching Jodie's evangelical gun shopping channel, but as I had lost the extended gun channel content, I needed a new reason for Pete to dream his wife had been murdered by an intruder. Then I had the idea that he'd simply been watching a slasher horror film.
The lightbulb moment was conceiving that Pete should watch a film in which the protagonists would mirror the events of Pete's evening, and therefore induce the appropriate nightmare. I quickly wrote and storyboarded the idea in the style of a clichéd low budget slasher.
I then needed some local actors. As we were now in full Covid-19 lockdown, traveling off Eigg was not an option. Luckily I have some talented local pals, Brendan Green and Nan Fee, who were up for starring in the mini-movie. Oli Stewart kindly lent us the use of his living room and bathroom for an evening, (as well as his gloved, knife wielding hand) and a few hours and splats of tomato ketchup later, we had it all filmed.
Nan and Brendan mirroring Rachel and Pete.
I was pleasantly surprised and satisfied with how well the new footage fitted into the old scenes of Pete watching TV, his expressions were entirely appropriate to the new content.
The last piece of the puzzle was to film Joe and me singing along with the track, to fill in some blanks. Originally I didn't think it necessary as the video was very plot dense, but it does well to remind people that it is actually a music video they're watching, not a weird comedy/horror film. It also gave good use to green masked footage we'd filmed but hadn't really found a good place for.
Joe with green tights over his face, which gave a great effect when superimposing other elements.
Needless to say I backed up all my work on 2 hard drives this time around, and when it was all finished and safely uploaded to youtube I could breathe a sigh of relief!
I'm very proud of the video and how it ultimately turned out, even if it wasn't precisely what was first conceived, I'd say it's at least as good as the original cut. There was a huge effort put in to the original production, and then again to retrieve and build the new video, not just by me, but by the whole band and our gracious friends who indulged our ambitious artistic vision.
Pete buying a gun over the phone - unused footage from the original storyline
Our first video to accompany the release of our album, GODLUST, was hosted by a major media outlet on their website and drove a lot of traffic to the video. Unfortunately we were unable to garner the same media interest in "An Itchy Finger". One Japanese music magazine told me they loved the music, but wouldn't touch the video because it was too gorey and they'd risk the video being blocked! I try to take that as a compliment, although it's somewhat ironic that the video which took more effort that all other projects I've worked on combined has been seen very little! So, if you like the video, and think it deserves to be seen more, please point people in its direction. Thank you.
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