Earlier this year I had the privilege of working with the YWCA Central Carolinas to produce a video that played during their annual fundraiser – the We Believe Luncheon. The video was meant to describe what the organization does, explain how it affects those who participate in their various programs and encourage donors attending the luncheon to give to the YWCA.
In our first meeting, the staff and I discussed a number of themes and objectives to aim for in the video. In addition to telling the personal stories of the YWCA participants who agreed to be interviewed, we also wanted to touch on the history of the YWCA.
During a tour of their facility on Park Road in South Charlotte, I noticed a number of beautiful old photographs along the walls that the YWCA had taken over the years. Although the photos were decades old, they still closely resembled the day-to-day business of the current YWCA. I thought these photos would be a great way to convey the history of the organization and provide a great visual aesthetic with which to begin and end the video without taking up too much time in the narrative.
Production still from YWCA Central Carolinas shoot
To do this, the staff and I identified six photos to reinterpret for the video. We staged the scenarios from the photos with present-day actors (played by actual YWCA participants). I held up the original photos as references for my cinematographer, Ben Premeaux, to match with his camera. Then in post-production, I dissolved between the photos and the corresponding video footage and added some sound effects to complete the scenes.
Beginning and ending the video this way gave a greater context to the narrative, but it also added a great introduction and ending to the video. Since the primary purpose of the video was to play to a live audience at the luncheon, the 30 second intro gave the audience some time to settle into what they were about to watch, and the final 20 seconds of the video (which also featured this photo-to-video technique) provided nice symmetry and a gradual winding down of the narrative to end the video.
The video played to an audience of 800 people at the Westin Charlotte on February 19, 2013 and is available for viewing on the YWCA Central Carolinas’ website.
2013 ‘We Believe’ Luncheon video playing at the Westin Charlotte
I was first introduced to the Charlotte hip hop collective, Forever FC, at a J. Cole concert I went to last year. At one point during his show, Cole said to the audience that we should keep our ears to the ground for a rapper from Charlotte named Lute. Once I got over the embarrassment of J. Cole knowing about an artist from my city before I did, I Googled Lute and found that he is but one of a set of artists (rappers, producers, designers, photographers, videographers and stylists) who make up the collective, Forever FC.
I was initially struck by the professional look and sound of the group’s work. From the design of their mixtape covers to the quality of their mixes, photographs and videos, they seemed to run their operation more like an indie record label than an emerging rap group.
When I first reached out to Forever FC, I was working on the Charlotte Video Project. We ended up producing two short documentary videos with them for the CVP – one on the group as a whole and one on one of Lute’s live performances. We eventually started talking about doing music videos together, and by the end of 2012 we decided to collaborate on visuals for two songs – “Queen City Slummin’” by Lute featuring Ry and “The Don’s Chant” by Schyler Chaise.
To start these two projects I began by asking Lute and Schyler what words and images came to mind when they thought about their respective songs.
Queen City Slummin’
Lute used words like “old,” “poor” and “country” to describe his song. He imagined the video being filmed in black and white and wanted to feature an old car somehow. He pointed to the film Hustle & Flow and Common’s music video for “The Corner” as examples of a feel that he’d like to work toward.
With that in mind, I went to a trailer park that I’d passed dozens of times leaving high school in Huntersville, NC. I snapped some photos of a few locations and sent them to Lute. He responded, “This is perfect.”
Location photo for “Queen City Slummin’”
For the car, a friend lent us an old Chevy Caprice, and the story pretty easily fell into place thereafter: Lute drives the car, rapping to himself behind the wheel and picks up Ry who jumps in midway through the song to rap his verse. I cut that story in with a few shots of Lute and Ry rapping to the camera in the various locations that we’d identified beforehand, and that became the video for “Queen City Slummin’.”
This video was meant to achieve an aesthetic – an early 90s feel reminiscent of Tribe Called Quest and early Nas, but with “The Don’s Chant,” we aimed for a more narrative-driven concept.
The Don’s Chant
Schyler’s video took a bit longer to conceptualize. He’d said that he wanted to work with a red, black and gold color scheme and used words like “grunge,” “dark” and “women” when describing what the song meant to him.
I’d seen the cover art for the song, which features an old photo of boxer Mike Tyson with his infamous promoter Don King. This seemed like something interesting to build upon. Because “The Don” usually refers to Don Corleone – not Don King – this concept would turn the traditional meaning of “The Don” on its head.
I started to do some research on Don King and came across a clip on YouTube of an interview he did with Chris Rock on the Chris Rock Show. In the interview, Rock asks King what exactly his job entails, and King launches into this wonderful little monologue in which he likens his work to that of John the Baptist. I had never seen Don King talk about his own work like this before and decided to start the video with this clip. The interview clip establishes this Don and not the other (more common) Don as well as boxing as a theme.
Location photo for “The Don’s Chant”
The overall look that we decided on was largely influenced by a location that I’d stumbled across in Downtown Charlotte – a stunningly geometric atrium in a condominium building. It looked like the inside of a deserted cruise ship. I sent Schyler a picture. “I’m digging it,” he said.
The story came to be about Schyler’s character playing out a portion of what Don King describes in his interview. This character – who is somehow involved in the boxing industry – retrieves a briefcase (presumably full of cash) from an associate and delivers it to a boxer. However, the contents of the case are never explained, which makes for an overall ambiguous narrative. What’s in the case? Is this a dream sequence? A trailer for a larger film?
Who knows?
Overall I had a blast working with the Forever FC family on these projects, and I look forward to more collaborations like these in the future!
