Munk - Grave, new music video directed by yours truly

May 13, 2008

When Munk came out for my surprise birthday party, I was sitting there at Yamashiro’s next to him and it hit me that we needed to shoot a music video for something off his new album MODEST AMONG THE LIVING. I wasn’t sure how we’d do it or which song we’d do but I told him we just had to do it. I had a green screen wall in the garage and a camera… why the hell not?

Of course with zero budget.

So he came over with the idea that he could play a news anchor which worked great because of the limited space and Munk’s bad ankle from his car wreck. We shot his takes over the course of a couple of hour and as I was watching him do his thing an idea came to me. “Grave” would be thematically about how the media, especially the news, blurs the line between real drama and “manufactured” drama.

So it took me some doing to cut it all together in what little spare time I have and slowly but surely it started to take shape. As I thought about it some more and figured which assorted other clips and images would go in there, I really began to think the concept would work. I think the end result speaks for itself.

A couple of people asked what equipment I used to make this video.

• Sanyo VPC-HD1000BK Xacti HD1000 Hi-Def Camcorder with 10x Optical Zoom and 2.7 Widescreen TFT LCD
• Apple Final Cut Studio v.2.0 - Standard - 1 Seat - Retail - Mac, Intel-based Mac
  
• Apple iMac Desktop - Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2GHz - 1GB DDR2 SDRAM - 250GB - DVD-Writer (DVD R/ RW) - Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet - 20 Active Matrix TFT

That’s it.So, enjoy the video. I like the way it turned out and I think the vague storytelling you get from conceptual music videos comes through here both in the song and lyrics and in the images.

And the kicker is that while editing late one night, the idea for how to do “Things I Learned This Week” came to me in a flash.

“Modest Among the Living” on

“Grave” video on YouTube (click the “watch in high quality” link for best results)

“Grave” video on Mevio.com

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