Before I launch into bringing you up to date with my news, I just want to say, once again, how much I appreciate you being there for me to share my musical journey with. It’s your support that keeps me going!
Since I last wrote to you I’ve been working more on my website (I hope to have that finished really soon) attending an online music conference and, of course, spending time singing and playing the guitar (seems I always forget to mention that!). The highlight however, was Monday afternoon. I arrived at Mike’s house fully clad in my leathers, with my hair and make-up done, and ready to start shooting the video for my first single “Dreams Come”. In my mind I thought we’d only manage to shoot the main sequence in the short time we had, but we did really well and finished shooting all the sequences. Having a clear plan beforehand definitely helped! I had 6 outfit changes (in reality, just the tops, as most of the shots were from the waist up) although Mike claimed that he couldn’t tell the difference between them as they were all black, and 3 of the 6 were short-sleeved. I like black.
Most of the scenes were shot indoors. For these I had to lip-synch to the song. This wasn’t quite as easy as I had imagined. It seemed very strange mouthing at the camera! We did, however, venture out into the garden to get some extra footage and that’s when I realised that I’d forgotten how to walk! Something I do naturally without even thinking about it suddenly seemed awkward when I was told to walk towards the camera! I’m just glad it didn’t reach the predicted 30C and we had some cloud cover as I had quite a few layers on! We’re not quite sure what we’re going to do with the outdoor scenes yet (they weren’t part of the original plan) but we felt it would be good to get as much footage as we could to give us scope for experimenting and filling in the gaps – as you may have noticed from the Storyboard notes I shared with you in the last newsletter, we had an instrumental section with a question mark against it, plus another note saying “weird stuff”.
One of the things I am constantly having to overcome with my music is letting go of my performance insecurities (whether it be with my voice or how I look). As I’ve mentioned before, transitioning from being purely a song-writer to a performing songwriter feels very self-exposing and shooting the video was no exception. It used to feel so easy when I just wrote songs in the confines of my own home (i.e. boat) with only the 4 walls (bulkheads) to see and hear me. Every step I take along this journey though, helps me to let go and become more self-accepting. I am very grateful to Mike for never making me feel uncomfortable, never cringing (when inside I am cringing) and only ever being encouraging and most importantly, being great fun to work with.
So now the hard work begins – the editing process! As I mentioned last time, we have already created a digital backdrop using Vegas video editing software. We had a bit of extra time yesterday, so we uploaded the video sequences and started to line them up with the timeline of the song. There’s still a lot of work to do, but time finally ran out on us, so we’ll continue again next week. I’ll let you know how we are progressing in my next newsletter and I’ll also share with you some of the stills from the video. And, of course, you will be the first to see the finished video (before I release it to the public).
Finally though, I thought you might like a bit of a giggle to see the “morning after” photo (when was too lazy before I went to bed to wash all the product out of my swept back hair! I promise I did take my make-up off though).
Until next time, take care,
Laini xx