Making the Green Scenery video

Ahh the English countryside, the rolling hills and beautiful views... or the pissing rain and murky skies of a wet Sunday afternoon in Alfriston. Yes, the filming of the Green Scenery video was somewhat of a battle against the elements, luck was certainly not on our side that day in late September.

The mixing of the Green Scenery audio was nearing completion, but we had run out of time to get some of our grand video ideas into action, so we agreed that something more simple to fit with the track was required if we were to maintain a steady release of material from the new album. In the weeks leading up to the day of filming, the weather had been amazing, lovely long shadows on the ground, leaves starting to fall and a bright, low, autumn sunshine. So, it seemed a perfect time to get out and shoot some nice shots of the band outdoors for a change, as this was surely the most fitting track for such an excursion.

Although our original ideas for this video had been much more complex and we had dissucssions about backwards filming and slow motion set pieces (which we may well get round to for the next video) I wanted to take the opportunity to get the band out of the rehearsal room for this video and ban the use of instruments for endless cutaways. So, in that sense the video did achieve it's goal. However, we wanted to get to a few more locations on the day, but we were seriously blighted by the bad weather after getting only 30mins or so of footage.

From a technical standpoint, this video also represents the end of an era in ACAS videos. For the last few videos I'd been using a DIY 35mm lens adapter to try and get some nice depth of field in the shots and add some power to the imagery. It certainly worked, but had one major peril - using the adapter meant that everything filmed appears upside down and back to front in the viewfinder of the camera! For lots of tripod filming, seen in the likes of the All The Wasted Hours video, this didn't prove such a problem, but when it came to running around fields it was never going to work. So we bolted a great big external monitor on the camera which would invert the image for us to see what the hell we were doing. This started well, myself and Jamie Tighe (a long time friend of ACAS and indeed former drummer I might add!) were operating the camera and we were pleasantly surprised at how much the monitor was helping. Then, after about 15mins of filming, we noticed that we were slowly holding the camera lower and lower as the sheer weight started to kill our wrist muscles. You might notice a lot of the shots in the Green Scenery video are looking up at the band slightly, this is because poor old Jamie could barely lift the camera after a while! So, I've sold off the trusty camera that has done me so well over the years and have made the step up to an HD set-up which will allow me to use lenses without all the messing around with an external monitor. Should make life a lot easier for the next video!