The opening shot is a little confusing and a little unreal.
That sense of unreality is because nearly every shot in this video
is being played back at the wrong speed.
We filmed this section at 30 frames a second,
but it’s being played back at 24,
80% of normal speed,
so it just seems a little bit off.
Plus, we’re using rapid cuts with no continuity between them.
Different clothes, different locations,
different everything.
We’ve also got some cutaways in extreme slow motion,
because it looks spectacular,
and it lets me do a moody stare into the distance
without having to hold it for so long that it becomes awkward.
It also lets us fit in some product placement.
Some of the shots aren’t slow motion, though.
This is being played back faster than real time,
so that the dancers seem more synchronised and precise than they really are.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re good,
but with the speed change, their movements look superhuman.
Also, there are dancers,
because having attractive people move in attractive ways
makes the video more appealing.
We couldn’t afford a wind machine for this shot,
so we bought a leaf blower from a hardware store.
We kept the receipt, so we can return it after we’re done.
The trouble with filming everything in the wrong frame rate
is that my voice won’t sound right.
So the vocal track for this was pre-recorded in a studio,
and I’m lipsyncing it at the wrong speed.
If my lips don’t quite match up at some point,
we’ll just cut to another take,
or to a completely random slow-mo shot of an object being destroyed,
and no-one’ll care.
Actually, this isn’t the studio where we recorded the vocal track.
I recorded this weeks ago so we could plan everything,
but we didn’t film that session,
so we had to go to this separate recording studio to fake that footage.
This microphone isn’t even plugged in.
- We’re now about two thirds of the way through
so here’s a middle eight from me, the featured artist,
in an attempt to cross-promote us.
Our schedules didn’t match up, so this was all filmed separately.
Despite that, we’re still trying to convince everyone
that Tom and I met up and are great friends
and are definitely in the same room.
- This is the bit where we break up the video with a bit of diegetic audio,
so people can’t just rip the whole thing off YouTube.
This isn’t actually a party.
It may look like we’re having a spectacular time,
as that’s the image we want to project,
but in reality we are on our fifteenth take.
Everyone would quite like to go home.
This final section is important, though,
because it resolves the question at the start:
why am I falling into a swimming pool?
Because ending the same way we started makes the audience think that
there’s a sensible, circular narrative that ties everything together.
Even if there isn’t.
You can’t buy this on iTunes or stream it on Spotify.
It’s... it’s not a song.