Reasons to Smile [Music Video]

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This video is a collaboration with Timothy Hagerty and Austin Presley. We met during a casting call for musicians and artists for my Intermediate Videography class. Timothy plays the ukulele and played a new song he composed for me. I asked if he was interested in making a music video, and well, the video above is what we created.

Timothy and his good friend Austin (with his djembe) came over to my place to do some test shots. I’ve never shot a music video before, and they never played the song together. The testing was fun. It gave them a chance to practice together, and it gave me a chance practice testing my video gear.

A couple weeks later we heading out to Morgan Territory, a regional preserve just north of Livermore, CA. We spent a couple hours filming at least ten different takes in different areas of the park.

Since recording audio on the field wouldn’t sound good enough for the music video, they recorded a clean “studio” version later on. This is what I used for the video above.

Lesson #1 for music videos: Get the exact audio file of the song before anything. The problem was that the version they played while recording was different than they recorded later on in the studio. Granted, they had more practice and the new version sounded awesome. But, man, it was almost impossible to get it to match the video clips. I think I did alright. Did you notice?

For the next music video, I’m going to be sure to get their recording for filming and play it on ghetto blaster. That way they will be playing the exact version of the song that I’ll use in the video.

We had a great time working together and Timothy is interested in doing another video. I can’t wait to see what we come up with next.

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