Partners in Crime – Jake Aldridge [Music Video]
Partners In Crime – Jake Aldridge Music Video
Last month we were contacted by Suffolk based singer/rapper Jake Aldridge who found us via a Google search for music video producers. Jake has a new single due to be released and he was searching for a competent and professional videographer, or video production company to bring his vision to life. The great thing about Jake coming to us was that we were able to work together to develop a concept for the video, we initially met at a local café, unknowingly on a live-music night… it was pretty loud! But, it set the tone, we shared different ideas that we had for the video and discussed different options for the visuals, story, theme, models, lighting, set/location and more. The song ‘Partners In Crime’ is as the name suggests – it’s a fun and cheeky, playful song with an upbeat country-pop style and infectious lyrics! We needed to create a video that would be representative of that. The video would need to have bright colours and a good location that would allow us to make the most out of the budget, whilst keeping the visuals dynamic and engaging.
Our initial idea was to create the entire video in a controlled studio environment, we would use different lighting configurations and techniques such as greenscreen to get a wide variety of shots with fun colours, camera movement and action to suit the song.
A while after the meeting we decided to abandon the studio idea in favour of what we felt was the perfect location, Jake had done some searching and he’d managed to get hold of the owners of Cecilia’s Cocktail Bar in Norwich and they agreed to allow us to use the location to shoot the video. As it’s a good 60+ miles from our studio, Jake scouted the location and sent us some images and a quick walkthrough video that he shot on his phone – it was perfect!
Without giving too much away, the idea that we came up with for the video, was to have Jake essentially fantasizing about an alternate (but possible) reality, involving the barmaid being his ‘Partner In Crime’ – not literally committing crime (that would be too literal). We chose to have an intro scene where Jake would walk in and order a drink and between the first verse and the pre-chorus he would enter his fantasy. At this point, there would be a dramatic lighting and costume change to signify the transition.
We chose a colour palette for the video which included the pink set, the outfits and lighting colours. We opted for a blue and pink lighting arrangement, these are complementary colours and they look great together, to pull it off we used two 5ft LED tubes, and two Yugno YN360 light sabre’s as well as some smaller LED panels with coloured gels, two Aperture 120D’s with softboxes for key and hair lights, and a fog machine to diffuse the lighting and to add some depth and visual interest to the scene.
The location was absolutely brilliant as it had so many different parts to it, which allowed us to get a wide variety of performance and b-roll shots for the video – we were able to constantly switch it up without it becoming repetitive or boring. Filming in Cecilia’s lasted from 10am-3:30pm, we then headed to our second location where Jake had a Dodge Charger and a Camero lined up, Danielle and Jake would perform outside of the cars and with one car each for some performance shots for the video. We lit the scene with the 120D’s, two LED panels, two YN360’s, as well as the 5ft LED tubes behind the cars to cast coloured light on to the walls, and we used two fog machines to catch the light and add more visual interest and depth to the scene. To compensate for high winds, we created a cooling chamber using air ventilation ducting, a 90L bin, and 10 bags of ice – this cooled the fog which prevented it from dispersing as quickly as it laid lower to the ground and was denser.
Overall, we are very happy with how the video has turned out! The colours look great, the performances were fantastic, and it was a great effort from everyone involved. We are excited to share the music video and we will update this blog post with a link as soon as Jake is ready to post the video.
We’ll be updating the website soon with a music videographer/music video production page, in the meantime – you can find other examples in our portfolio, or on our YouTube channel.
