How i direct Music Videos that don’t SUCK!

Tom literally JUST walked into the room and told me that he just wrote a song and in the video he wants to levitate… and we’re quarantined so he wants to do that FROM HOME… in my TINY home photography studio/ music studio/office/merch warehouse/ home gym and fucking gear locker. But somehow, someway, and probably tomorrow, I will figure out how to make my boyfriend FLY because I want him to be able to look at his music video when I’m done and feel like the coolest motherfucker alive.

I’ve worked as a director on the side of having a music career for years.. but directing is mostly making creative decisions, hiring a team that can execute your vision and yelling. LOTS OF YELLING. I never even really touched a camera until about 2 years ago. At the time Tom’s career was exploding exponentially, we needed content FAST and didn’t have the cash to pay a $2500 day rate for someone professional to shoot it. So we figured it out.

There was a lot of THIS:
”Do you think we can duct tape this light to the ceiling?"
“If I hang this 20 pound chain over the fan and swing the light i attached to it do you think it will crush us?”
”Do you think I can soften this light with a bedsheet?”

Nowadays the goals are HIGHER THAN EVER because our music videos earned way way way over 100,000,000 views last year. Everything has to look like it’s deserving of that.

Most videographers shooting videos at my level are rolling into shoots with a hundred thousand dollar CAMERA, every light you can think of and a crew of 20 people. Well I don’t want to brag but my camera costs like $2500, I can fit all of my gear into a pink suitcase, and my crew consists of the same 2 guys I hire on every shoot, who bring some extra lights and help me rig everything up. They’re the nicest people I have ever met in my life, and combined, they’ve spent longer in prison than I have even been alive.

Now in quarantine I don’t even have my guys! They drop off gear or props i might need and i wave through the window, and then im left alone, trying to figure it out in our extremely modest 1500 sf house that we have always had worked from home in, but at one point, long ago, were also allowed to leave.

At the very beginning of this quarantine (and hi, yes, we’re still here!) Tom wrote a song about the Coronavirus, so we risked it all at a Target and shot in moody window in our bedroom:

I stayed up til 5am, with a kidney infection, moving every piece of furniture in our house, drilling 30 fluorescent lights into the wall and trying every color gel on EVERY SINGLE LIGHT trying to get it as good as it possibly could be.

I filled our living room with fog and basically just laid on the floor.

I also completely ruined my brain at 3 o’clock in the morning trying to figure out ALL THE DIFFERENT VIBES I could give to different parts of this song using a zoom lens, three lights and a black backdrop, and WE TRENDED AT NUMBER ONE ON YOUTUBE. Good job us.

I miss doing our bigger (but still relatively small) shoots, so much so, that apparently I have written like 5000 words here about my creative process in conceptualizing a video, and the questions I ask myself along the way.

Before I shoot and direct a music video, I ask myself these key things:


Should it be cinematic or feel real? Is it funny?

If I’m shooting for “real” I’ll try to bypass artificial lighting entirely and most of my shots will be handheld so you feel like you’re really living inside of them. If I’m going cinematic, I will use more intense lighting and try to move every shot seamlessly. If I’m going for funny I’ll usually accentuate jokes with zooms, and lean towards colorful environments.

Deciding what tone I want the video to have is hard, even the most serious song could be hilarious as a comedy. But it’s the first step to seeing the video in my head.

What’s the color scheme?

Then I’ll start pulling ideas into a moodboard. The most important thing to me, is that EVERYTHING LIVES IN THE SAME WORLD, even if we’re shooting in 5 different places, on 5 different days, and we don’t even have so much as in IDEA for days 3, 4 or 5, it all has to feel COHESIVE in the end.

Here’s the mood and color board that I made with for “I Wish”, and the shots I ended up with:

This is the mood board I made (and kept building on) for “Everybody hates Me”, along with it’s finished product and the shotos. We didn’t KNOW what we were going to shoot in it’s entirety, so as we shot pieces, I pulled them into the moodboard and continued to build around them.

The colors really tie this video together. Every shot has aqua or red in it, so while all of these scenes are WILDLY different, it still feels like you’re in THE SAME WORLD. I shot an entire YELLOW performance piece that you can see in the moodboard, and ended up throwing it away because it didn’t fit our color scheme.

BUT - for the bridge, we did this to demonstrate the contrast between a more serious part of the song and all of our hilarious set ups for impact.

How can we make it special?

This is the part that kills us for days. We’ll know how we want the video to feel, maybe have a couple locations in mind, but still don’t know WHAT is going to be the piece that really makes our music video different.

Tom has dug graves in our front yard, stood on top of cop cars, I have hit him in the face with pies, and yes, we even rented a unicorn for the day. We try to have at least one creative or weird set up in every video, and usually, they’re a metaphor for the entire song, pulled together neatly in one single shot.

THEN I PLAN FOR ALL OF MY PLANS TO CHANGE

Once we’ve found our vibe, picked the color scheme, and found a way to make it special? I make a shotlist to MAKE DAMN SURE I don’t forget anything… and then I PLAN FOR LITERALLY ALL MY PLANS TO CHANGE. The most important thing when directing is FLUIDITY. A location might not look how you expected it to, the sun might not be on your side and you may have to pivot your ideas, last minute, in order to make the best of what you have.

Here’s the document we made for Tom and I’s music video “I’m Not Well”, which we co-directed and was shot by a friend.

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Pretty much HALF of what we planned to do didn’t work out and we ended up driving around untill 5am looking for locations that would work. The rooftop we wanted to use was so crowded that we were quite literally racing the setting sun, and ended up settling for a Home Depot with a raised parking lot. The light tunnel was heavily guarded and we got kicked out before we could even get a shot. We did run on top of the tables in mcDonalds but they really didn’t like that so we sacrificed the fight scene. Our main performance pieces, the one in the tunnel, and the clinically white architectural room (the lobby of an apartment building) were just places that we found at 4 am, after hours and hours of finding nothing.

The key to directing cohesive music videos is being able to see the best possible version of the video in your head BEFORE you get to the shoot because you need to know what you’re aiming for.

Hope this was a cool read, drop your questions in the comments. ❤️

Making Music VideosNOVA ROCKAFELLER