The song 'Patah' literally means 'broken', 'brokenness' or 'to break'. Lyrically speaking, the message of the song is about broken relationships. The band did not intentionally write the song for the campaign but, as it turns out, the song was a perfect fit for the message of the campaign. The White Ribbon Campaign (WRC), for those who don't know about it, is the largest effort in the world of men working to end men's violence against women.

And so the concept of the video was ironed out based on 2 factors: one, the message of the campaign had to be incorporated into the video, and two, the video needed to be completed in less than 3 weeks.

First week was spent with budgeting and pre-production. I already had in my mind what I wanted to do. My plan was to keep it as simple as possible without sacrificing on quality. My best reference for 'Patah' was Good Charlotte's 'Hold On' music video. Simple yet effective in conveying a message. So with that in mind, I had to sort out camera related equipment.

I approached FilmGear because I had in mind to use some dolly and tracks for the video. After calculating rental and shipping costs (equipment had to be shipped to East Malaysia), we finally decided that we could only afford a ONE DAY shoot.

Oh, and I forgot to mention earlier, but we were not only going to be shooting one, but TWO music videos for Evenstarr. I'll talk about the other song 'Ruang Di Antara' in another post sometime in the next few weeks.

A few days later, I'm in Kuching at the Sarawak Tourism Complex where we booked an auditorium for the shoot. The dolly and tracks were only going to arrive the second day so the first day was spent setting up the lights, calibrating my camera and planning camera moves. In Kuching, we rented a goal post for the top lights as well as 24 1KW Par Cans together with a light mixer, dimmers, some industrial fans and a smoke machine.

Second day, shoot had to start late as some of the band members worked office hours and could only arrive about 7pm. After dress-up, make-up, etc, we officially started shooting at about 9pm. We had to shoot the talents first even though I had my circular tracks all set up for 'Ruang Di Antara' which I thought of shooting first since it was simpler. So I had the straight tracks set up near the side wall and had the talents sit in a corner of the room. All we did were simple dolly ins and outs with variations for each talent. After that, the final group shot for 'Patah' had to be shot because some of the talents were up way past their bedtimes and were sleepy already. Also, not to mention their nagging parents. ;)

In any case, after the talents were gone, we were free to work on the band's performance. The first song we did was 'Ruang Di Antara' on the circular track - of which I'll talk more about later on in another post. Suffice to say that the song was difficult for the band (esp the drummer) to pull off because I edited the audio with varying speed changes from 30% slower to 50% faster at one point. We ended up finishing 'Ruang Di Antara' at about 1am. The band's performance for 'Patah' was easy but by then everyone was pretty tired. 'Patah' also required frequent re-arrangements of the track to get varying moves and angles. I sped up the song by 30% but it was much more manageable as the song was slow to begin with. For those who are wondering why I speed up or slow down songs, it's simply for me to be able to slow down or speed up the footage in post and still keep it in sync with the audio. It's a simple trick to get that slo-mo effect.

I got most of what I think I needed by 3am and called it a wrap. I was dead tired and couldn't really think straight anymore.

After that, it was all up to Premiere Pro and After Effects to create the hocus pocus and voila, the world premiere of Evenstarr's 'Patah', brought to you by yours truly. Cheers.