The Sheffield Scenester

DAY 1 – March 11th
On the outskirts of Rotherham is Magna, the former steelworks which has been turned into an interactive science museum, today however I was here to observe the shooting of the new Jackson Caged video for the song ‘Every Fall’. I was carefully escorted through various dimly lit passages, passing many dis-used relics from its former glory days that I’d only seen from the overhead walkway as a paying visitor to the museum. Walking through this industrial holocaustic graveyard, I could hear the familiar sound of ‘Every Fall’ being blasted out, so knew I was heading in the right direction. Finally reaching the source of all the noise I found Jackson Caged, namely Mike, Woody, Rich and Fraz, performing away as if they were on the stage at O2 whilst hovering around with a couple of cameras were Martin Rezi and Gary Edwards of Fat-Baby Videos, filming away.

Jackson Caged had put out on their Facebook page that today was all about the band shots, whereby they were going to film an entire performance and cut that together with a storyline that was due to be filmed in a few weeks time. So sure enough no angle was left to chance as they repeated over and over their show, depending on what was being filmed determined positions at times, but otherwise they tried to keep continuity. The set itself did look really derelict, with every surface being covered in a thick layer of dirt from years gone by, everytime Rich jumped about with his guitar, a huge dust cloud bounced off the metal gantry we were all stood on…..I wasn’t the only one who raised concerns about its ability to withstand this punishment, luckily this place was built to last!

Several things about this set up struck me as funny, firstly was that every visitor to the museum, as they travelled along the walkway to the huge overhead Air Pavilion, stopped to watch for a while, young and old alike, and didn’t seem at all bothered by the fact that they didn’t use the clean version of the song. One mother and daughter even went dancing off after Fraz had done, for the umpteenth time, the line “And they’re here to F*CK YOU!” Secondly they had to stop filming for fifteen minutes out of every hour while The Big Melt Show, which is a combination of visual effects with a narration, was performed; still it did give the dust a chance to settle a bit.

When it came time for the museum to close Gary and Martin finished their last scene of Mike’s kick drum, all the gear was packed up and taken down the various rickety stairways out to the car park. I grabbed a welcome drink and drove off into the sunset looking forward to the next day of shooting as this was to be open to the public, a chance for the fans to become film stars for a day!

DAY 2 – March 27th
I arrived down at The Forum on Division Street at around 1700hrs, to find Martin and Gary talking over how they were going to plan the evenings shoot, what sort of locations they needed, the number of people required for each scene. Meanwhile Fraz, Woody and Rich were sat around with numerous friends and family relaxing waiting to see what was happening, whilst they weren’t actually required in any of today’s scene’s they had obviously turned up for moral support, and it wasn’t long before they were joined by Mike. Fraz was kind enough to buy me a drink so settling down I grabbed the chance to quickly ask them them about the project itself:

Scenester: So what part of the video is being filmed today?
Mike: Basically the outline is the character played by Steve Hinsley, will be walking round the streets and bumping into people and stuff, I think it was The Verve who did a similarly themed one with Richard Ashcroft walking along the street knocking into people, its kinda similar to that in a way! But instead of being arrogant, Steve is going to be the one who’s running about being scared, but when he bumps into people we’re gonna zoom up onto people that are in the shot and they’re gonna have demonic features about themselves. Their eyes are gonna be more demonic, or they’ll have distortion in the face and stuff like that, while Steve is going to be a more angelic creature. I think they’re gonna have effects like wings on him every so often and maybe a light around him.
Scenester: And how did the ideas for this video come together in the beginning?
Fraz: Well it was all our idea, both us and Fat-Baby Videos, we all worked together on it and sort of come up with ideas and then someone would come up with a different idea and then we’d take it from there.
Mike: Yeah, we all met up at The Riverside Pub and we basically sat down and brainstormed various ideas about what we all wanted, what sort of storyline and the running round the streets parts, bumping into people and having demonic effects on them. Plus we talked about putting effects on the industrial set at Magna, sparks flying down and stuff like that.
Scenester: Compared to the ‘Jaws’ video how does this experience differ?
Fraz: This is a lot more in depth, last time with Jaws; we just turned up in a boxing ring, did it and left. Whereas this time, we did the band footage….but we’ve also got a story behind it, you know it has more of a concept to it!
Scenester: So how have you enjoyed the experience?
Mike: Well all the band footage was shot down at Magna, the scene setting was awesome for that cos we wanted an industrial look, the clips so far look really dark, grimy and dingy. But I’m really looking forward to the today cos this is the story behind it all!

Thanking them, it was time to move on as Martin and Gary walked down towards Corporation for the first scene which involved Steve walking down the street while a child sat watched him from the passenger seat of a car. As with the footage down at Magna this was shot from numerous angles with the two cameras, a procedure which was repeated for all the following scenes beneath the clear evening sky. Various friends and fans of the band were called down to be filmed doing the same thing, namely looking up as Steve walked along the streets, head down, trying to remain inconspicuous whilst every person he passed stopped what they were doing to look at him….a decidedly creepy concept now that I think about it! As the light of day slowly faded into dusk we had gradually migrated back up to Devonshire Green where they had two scenes left to shoot, the final one of Steve walking past the skateboard park and another one of a couple kissing in a doorway. On asking the gathered crowd if there were any couples who would be willing to do this, it turned out the only candidates were two women and so, while slightly embarrassed at first, they just got on with a kiss before turning to stare at Steve as he walked by! Finally it was my turn to have a go, so I did the stop and stare at Steve thing followed by a quick close up.
As filming was drawing to a close I managed to grab Martin and Gary for a chat about the video from their point of view, the more technical side…so to speak:

Gary: It’s our second film for Jackson Caged, it’s going really well so far….visually it’s really good with the Magna footage. We’re then going to put an extra element in, something which kinda describes the song, but is more thought provoking and will keep the viewer engaged.
Martin: Plus it was pretty dark and red in that room, so we thought to bring something with a more blue-ish night time feel to it. It’ll be a nice colour contrast from the bands orange and red look to these shots which we’re gonna give a more purple to blue colour treatment…so you get that switch in colour throughout to keep it a bit more interesting. People just get bored if they’re watching a video of a band playing, so you do need some kind of extra elements just to keep the viewer focused.
Gary: The lyrics to the song are about society today and people being a bit downtrodden, that kinda thing, so we wanted something thought provoking and visually stimulating that posed a few questions, so while there is no specific story going through it…….
Martin: It’s like one of them things where there’s not really any right or wrong, it’s kinda like you’re left wondering about Steve and towards the end of the video it reveals him as the good guy surrounded by all this evil. That’s what I’m taking from it…cos everyone looks at him with a kind of demonic look in their eyes and then later on we’ll be doing stuff were he’s looking a bit lost and you see hints of angel wings in shadows and things like that. It’s not tied in too closely to the lyrics, but it’s in with their artwork, they have this image of a guy in a suit with wings falling on their album and their EP. With the magna footage we’re gonna put a few sparks flying about from some of the equipment, which falls in nicely with that sort of image of hell nicely!
Gary: I think the main thing we focused on first was getting a complete performance video that looks visually stunning, then the stuff we do on top of that with the storyline is going to make it that much more interesting, but as of now we have a full performance already…….
Martin: We’ll take the weak bits out and place in some nice imagery! We kinda wanted this anyway cos in the past we’ve gone a bit too hard with plotline, which we’ve found hard to fit into three and a half minutes….but we want it to have some kind of story feel to it, you know something that was really stunning!

As the night rolled in, everybody retired back to The Forum and I finally managed to grab a quick word with the star of the story, Steve Hinsley, and ask him about his day in the spotlight:

Steve: I’m just enjoying it to be honest cos I’ve never done anything like this before, so it’s just an experience for me and having an artistic background I’m quite enjoying watching these guys work to be honest. I’ve done quite a bit of work for the band and it’s like they’re giving me a bit back, and it’s good to see the lads are doing well for themselves!

On that sentiment, I too would like to say thanks to Jackson Caged and Fat-Baby Videos, for letting me cover the shoot, and I am definitely looking forward to the final result! (The Video should be released within the next couple of weeks!)