Four Music Videos in One: A Different Kind by Harry T Pope
“Lamplight Media are my go-to production company for music videos and promotional clips. They always know how to bring my ideas to life with their technical expertise and are creative artists in their own right! They’ll come in and create a world with you and capture your aesthetic and identity, and work to bring that out of you.”
‘This idea is a bit more full on…’
Harry Pope’s vision for his latest flagship music video, A Different Kind, was just the kind of technical and creative challenge we love. His music is a mish-mash of influences (jazz-fusion, as Tim likes to call it), and Harry wanted to pay tribute to four of these influences in one piece. A Different Kind would be a journey through the eras of music video; starting with The Beatles’ 1964 US TV debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, through Billy Joel’s 1978 performance of “Movin’ Out” on The Old Grey Whistle Test, then Mötley Crüe’s unhinged 1981 video for “Live Wire”, concluding in 2004 with a recreation My Chemical Romance’s “Helena”.
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Each era required the recreation of authentic costumes, hairstyles, performance chemistry and specific video or film formats. Our objective was to do this on a sensible budget, while making a self-contained, engaging music video that was authentic to the filmmaking (or TV) techniques of each era. However, it still needed to appeal to the modern attention-poor online audience, so great care was required to find a balance between authenticity and engagement.
This was the largest creative challenge we had undertaken, short of our short & feature films, in the sense of the level of detail required.
Pre-Production
As with any large production, you have a series of challenges that need to be broken down. We split pre-production between Harry T Pope & Lamplight. Harry looked after the costumes, set dressing and casting. He assembled a cohort of ten musicians to play the roles of the band members from each era, and ensured each understood the character of the famous musician they were standing in for. Lamplight’s Callum, Tim and Jonny assumed the roles of director, director of photography and gaffer, respectively. A major technical challenge of the video was making the footage from our 6K cinema cameras look like 20th century broadcast cameras, or (in the case of “Helena”) 35mm film. Therefore, we tested our collection of modern and vintage cinema lenses to see which would suit each era, and if digital degrading was suitable to replicate the flares, aberrations and artefacts typical of those cameras. Jonny designed digital ‘LUTs’, the live colour profiles displayed by the cameras, so the final look of each era could be previewed on set, as we filmed.
The 60s, 70s & 80s scenes could all be achieved in one studio or theatre location. AV collaborator Aaron (Spriggan Productions) suggested The Whitty Theatre in Wokingham. This space was perfect to double as the television studios and stages we need to recreate, and could accommodate ~20 cast and crew. The recreation of ‘Helena’ required a Church, one close to the Whitty to make the unit move easier. St Michael & St Mary Magdalene Church in Easthampstead was selected for it’s gorgeous interior, which was as close as we could hope to get to the vast Mid-Western American church featured in the original My Chemical Romance video.
Harry and Callum collaborated to structure the video’s shotlist and progression through each era for specific sections of the song. Harry’s strongest musical influence is Billy Joel, so that era would be the starting point of the video. At this point, the production of the track had not yet been finalised, so Harry and producer Alex Baker were able to tweak the instrumentation of each verse to match the era that would be on-screen in the video.
Production
The first day of production went like clockwork, thanks to 1st Assistant Director Dan Clark keeping the ship on course. This freed up Callum & Tim to focus with Harry on the creative. The choice of a theatre as the main location proved to be prudent; as it came with the majority of lighting needed, dressing rooms, audio playback system, and rigging to replicate both stage & TV studio looks. We started in the 1970’s with Billy Joel, stage decorated with ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ signage and par can stage lights. A quick costume change and set re-dress after lunch saw the theatre time travel back a decade to the Beatles, complete with black & white sequin curtains and front-on studio lighting. A drone was used over the auditorium to mimic a TV studio ‘technocrane’ with some success. We used TV’s to display the original reference videos and the live camera feeds side by side, to ensure accuracy. Developing the LUTS really helped here, both cast and crew inspired by how close we were getting.
The second day of production started in the theatre, before moving to the ornate Easthamstead Church, with 1st Assistant Director Roxie Oliviera keeping an eye on the clock. We began with the spandex, leathers & dry ice chaos of Motley Crue. Whilst Harry & band extracted themselves from their leopard print heels, the production crew moved locations to the church. After applying liberal quantities of eye liner, the team wrapped up the shoot by releasing their inner emo surrounded by baptism fonts and pulpits. The success of this project laid in the planning, being able to check the reference videos against live camera feeds (already showing period-accurate LUTS) allowed a level of faithfulness to the original videos that surprised even Callum & Tim. Harry and the band paid great attention to imitating the musician’s performance in each reference; these two elements sublimely marrying to consummately achieve the creative vision.
Post-Production
The post-production process was straightforward, because we had a plan. Callum & Harry had made a detailed breakdown of the shots and eras that would sit over each section of the song. This meant the editing was more like painting by numbers than jigsaw without the picture on the box. The biggest challenge was in trying to find the balance between being authentic to the original, and still interesting for a modern audience, in relation to both edit pacing and image degradation. Callum, Tim & Jonny were surprised how hard we could push the image degradation and still retain a workable image. Jonny’s input from the start of the project fed into his role as a colourist and the video came together in harmony, aside from a few performance tweaks from Callum & Harry.
The video was delivered with a day to spare and launched on August 28th 2024, alongside the EP. A Different Kind by Harry T Pope can be found wherever you stream your music. We at Lamplight would like to give a huge thanks to Harry and his band(s) for entrusting us with his creative vision and being a fantastic collaborator. We look forward to future projects together. Harry said “Lamplight were fantastic to work with because they listened to all my ideas and offered a reality check when something wasn’t achievable. But at the same time, found ways to achieve my vision within the [project] budget and time we had. Everything ran really smoothly on the shoot day[s] as they’d organised so well, and planned for any problems we might face. Finally, the editing process was really quick, they were very fast to react to any feedback that I offered. If you’re a musician looking to have a music video created, Lamplight are the perfect production company to come to because they themselves are artists, and they want to create a piece of art with you … They’ll come in and create a world with you and capture your aesthetic and identity, and work to bring that out of you. Lamplight Media are my go-to production company for music videos and promotional clips. They always know how to bring my ideas to life with their technical expertise and are creative artists in their own right!”
