Another collaboration with Vaughan Arnell and Idris Elba for Brothers & Sisters. This one, while appearing relatively simple was anything but!
My team and I had to research over 200 hours of TV to find the full length character shots that Idris could play off and the script could be built around, no easy task I can tell you although I have now seen all of Game Of Thrones albeit back to front and at double speed!
Enjoy!
I love working with Vaughan Arnell, it means I get to work on stuff like this with some of the biggest artists in music and they don't get much bigger or global than George Michael.
This was an absolute delight to cut, even though I had sixteen and half hours of footage which all looked amazing. Managing that amount of footage in a short timeframe is a major part of the job.
These days it's getting rarer and rarer to have any direct contact with the artists you're ultimately working for but on this occasion I had the pleasure of spending some time in the company of the great man himself and I have to say it was something of a masterclass. His changes could be quite small and subtle but would always enhance the video and it would always come from his overall vision of what he wanted to communicate through the song. He places as much importance on the visual representation of his music as the music itself.
They always say don't meet your idols but in this case I'm bloody glad I did.
It's 16 years since Vaughan Arnell created the classic video for Robbie Williams 'Angels'. Now he's gone and remade the video for Olly Murs with a knowing cameo from Robbie himself.
It was an interesting video for me to edit. I started by cutting Robbie's 'Angels' video to Olly's track a week before the shoot so that Vaughan and his team had a template from which to recreate the video shot for shot. Olly's track is a minute shorter than 'Angels' so I had to try and keep the feeling and flow of the original whilst losing 60 seconds of material, concentrating on the iconic shots that we associate with Angels, the ring in the sand, the motorbike and not forgetting the chopper!
Another little obstacle to overcome was that the original city location had been demolished, however the Barbican provided an ample replacement with its straight lines and angular geometry giving us the same feel as the original.
When it came to editing the new original material, I started by replacing my template I'd created the week before shot for shot or as close as I could. With this in place and now requiring extra space for the scene when Olly meets Robbie it was now essential to rebalance the video slightly to make sure that the video worked as a standalone piece for Olly as well as being an homage to 'Angels'.
16 years is a long time in music videos but a good video is timeless and hopefully this homage proves it.
