A crate of old records

Sorry about the lack of updates – life got in the way there for a while. Well, a state of being forced to stare at the ceiling, but that’s another story. It’s given me a decent amount of time to have a think about the other major component of the film clip – the GTK style studio clip – which I’m not sure has been mentioned here previously. For those who don't know of GTK, it was a music television show on the ABC in the early 70's (before Countdown existed), in which popular rock acts of the time would play a song or two for the cameras, with a number of bands performing on the program each week.

Usually there’s not a great deal of thought that goes in to these things – band sets up, band plays, TV crew shoot it, band buggers off. Easy. Except when you’re transporting your viewer into another era. For someone of my age, it can be difficult not to get too cliché about the 70s… let’s face it, we weren’t alive, and as far as we’re concerned, ‘flower power’ and disco could have been going on at the same time. Alright, maybe not to that extent, but there were certainly a lot of fashion statements happening in the early 70s, and it can be confusing figuring which way to tread. Hope the Art Dept. have found something suitable. Will be meeting with them tomorrow, so we’ll find out then.

In this down time I’ve been raiding my GTK videos, and whilst there are very few clips in the collection (most of them are Billy Thorpe … t’grand master as far as I’m concerned) they are all very telling. If you were to compare them with Countdown for example, Countdown has a very glossy feel to it where it’s not so much about the music, but a document of the performance and whatever the hell they happened to be wearing. Lots of wide shots of the band and close ups of the singer. Sometimes you’d be wondering if the band actually had a drummer – they only really focused on the ‘marketable’ parts of the band (eg, the singer). GTK on the other hand really complements the music. More often than not it’s a really simple set, but the Director concentrates on getting visually interesting shots of the band. Things got a bit weird sometimes. Either the Director was wildly inexperienced, or smoked something heavy before the show, but it added an interesting edge to the clip. Not that I’m aiming for that edge, but it’d be nice to shoot something that complemented the song.