My brother, Derek, is crew with people in the Miami music scene since he himself is a musician (and in Miami). One of the people Derek plays/records/travels with a lot is Sam Friend, a singer/songwriter who has an EP and an album under his belt which have some really fantastic songs.

After I did some live videos for Derek, Sam and I got to talking and I pitched the idea of doing a music video for my favorite song of his, “Part of the Show”. Several months later, the video is done and available to check out here.

Shot last December, the video is taken from one of my favorite games (when I lived in a place where I had cable): finding something ridiculous on TV and watching it. I love scrolling through Comcast at any given time and seeing stuff that really has no place being seen by other people. A need for too much niche programming has left a glut of shows that are cheaply made and insanely targeted. Just thinking about how many shows there are about people baking cakes.

Anyways, I wrote out a treatment that ended up being fairly close to the final product. The apartment scenes were done in downtown Miami when my brother and his girlfriend were moving out of their apartment so it was completely bare. “Swagger” was shot down the street in Miami, and the dog dinner scene as well as “Bulb Buddies” was shot at Doug Klinger’s parents house in Pompano Beach. Thanks to Doug’s parent’s awesome rooftop deck and a patient dog (Layla), we were able to get some awesome rooftop shots which we under-lit to give the feeling of a crappy daytime movie.

So since this is my first music video project, what have I learned? Well, for one, doing a music video for a slower song is much harder than doing one for an up-tempo number. Sam has a catalog of some fantastic songs, and out of them I connected with this one, so that’s the one I pitched, but getting the pacing and timing right to create some momentum turned out to be a real challenge.

Other than that, I learned making music videos is a really fun, interesting experience. That, and I probably shouldn’t be my own DP.

Sam (and Derek too) will be making a trek up to New York soon to make Sam’s next album. He’s the real deal, so I encourage you to check out his current catalog (I especially recommend “Toetotoe”), enjoy the video, and look out for more from Sam in the future!