The Video - Boatswain's Call

Hi everyone.. Phew!!

Life is hectic as per usual and finding time to blog is getting harder.. However, undaunted, its time to do a website update and bring you the finished product.. our video....

The video was a long hard slog for us, started as an idea in Graeme's head and ended up an epic of vast proportions, well, OK.. of reasonable proportions. We filmed it at various locations throughout the country.. including a fair bit during a 10 day stretch in Hampshire, which included visiting Old Portsmouth, Southsea, Old Winchester Hill, then on the way back, The Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire. Graeme's parents, David and Margaret, very kindly allowed us to use their conservatory for the green screen shots.

Filming consisted of two side by side shoots,  a story element and then a performance element. Both requiring very different ideas and requiring two separate story boards (which Graeme created).. to allow us some consistency.

I (Sheena) made sure that costumes were appropriate for the time. Seeing as it was set during the Battle of Trafalger, around 1806 then the characters costumes needed to reflect that. It involved some improvising in part, and having to make a period dress on my part, but we both agreed the overall finished look was quite accurate.

I would love the filming went brilliantly, instead it involved lots of hard work, long days and sometimes improvising shots on location. We filmed so much footage and extra green screen footage so that Jon Aldersea would have a lot to play with.

Filming wrapped sometime at the end of 2014, but wasn't until early this year that we managed to find a slot with Jon to sit down and discuss post production and editing.

Discussing the post production/edits with Jon proved to be a breeze, he really got to grips with the vision for the finished piece and we knew that we could trust him to come up with some brilliant work for it, which he did. Lots of overlays, transitions and his general magic bought the piece to life. Once we started to see the work Jon was doing, we knew we'd made the right choice for this video, to bring it to life.

This video represents the culmination of four years work, of writing a song from scratch, recording it and finally giving it a visual.. We've learned a lot about video making along the way (we filmed it all ourselves using standard digital video cameras... no fancy hi-tech cameras here!) and are very pleased with the results.

Boatswain's Call Video

Please click on the link above.. not the picture..;-)

Hope you like it...
Please feel free to offer feedback...