Locations, locations…. where did you shoot and was it a super light crew to move quickly to the next spot? Please tell us about the shoot.
It was great, we shot all of Melanie’s scenes in Hackney, London – all in a long 12-hour day. That was a lot of fun. Then I headed to Cape Town to shoot the rest of the dancing scenes. It was a small crew as we had to get 15/16 scenes within two days. So there was a lot of rushing to each location.
What were the main challenges of the production and how did you resolve them?
I think the main challenge was fitting in time, I was on another job and had to be around for it, so I rushed off to Cape Town for three days only and then came straight back to get straight into the edit as we had a real quick turn around time. But all worked out great, my producer AIlsa and production company FAMILIA carried me through it.
Was it straight forward directing the performances?
Yeah, it was quite simple, Melanie was so easy to work with. We did a few different styles of a take and she was super happy to just go with it. Was great. As for the dancers, most of them I knew from living there in Cape Town for four years. So just crowd sourced all of them and they were really stoked to be part of it and all had a style and groove about them too.
It’s a great new look for Melanie. What were the challenges in shooting such a famous singer, while giving her a new style?
She’s the best, she really is. So easy to work with and just really trusted my vision and where I wanted to take the video. I think that’s why it did come out so well. Fabian my DOP did great with the lighting, I first said to him, I wanted a lot of harsh red. And he and his team did a great job lighting the whole set so we were free to move around a lot which was a blessing.
Did you shoot loads of footage and then did most of the synching in the edit? Great colour grade too.
We shot lots of performance and lots and lots of dancing. Dom who edited, has a great vision and was able to pick out the pieces of where I got people to do similar dancing. Joseph at CHEAT did an amazing job on the grade, really filled the gaps too!
The dancing feels natural – how did you manage to generate such genuine enjoyment in the performances?
Firstly I think because most of them are old friends (I haven’t lived there for a little while now) so they were all stoked to be apart of it. and also everyone wants to be in a video for a Spice Girl. The track is really great also and it made to everyone want to dance. There are two dancers in the video who just came up to us whilst shooting and wanted to dance because they loved the song too. That one was an actual genuine enjoyment to the song. Haha.
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