Loka - Meet Dad

*UPDATE* Could everyone who watches the video please give it a star rating on YouTube so we can know in cold hard stars just how good it is. Cheers.

A wee while ago, some friends and I entered a music video competition with a fairly interesting pedigree. The competition was put forth by a band called Loka, and they described their songs as 'music for films that haven't been made yet'. Their idea for their next album was to supplement it with a DVD which had a different music video for each song, so that you could 'watch' the entire album as well as listen to it. The competition started with an ideas phase, and Chris and I had a really neat story breaking session where we bounced an idea around until it formed into a cool shape. At the time I was working on a short story about a man on a space station who was slowly coming to the realization that nobody about him was actually there, but Chris was sick of making sci-fi videos, so we bought it down to earth and beat it about for a bit until it took the shape of the video that we have now (which is very, very different from the story I ended up writing). The initial idea outline was accepted into the first stage, but so were two other ideas for each song, so we had to make the vid to beat out those two competitors to make it into the final seven.

After storyboarding (also loads of fun), it left my domain of ideas and went to the true artists, Rob and Chris and Jayne, who I'm constantly in awe of because they are so creative and talented and inspiring. They took background photos and perfected the 'triangulization' effect you see in the vid (although to be honest the effect is lost somewhat in the YouTube encoding). We then spent a couple of really fun nights against a bluescreen filming the footage to layer over the photography, and this is a big thank you to all my friends who showed up and were extras in the vid- you were all great. Then Rob and Chris and Jayne all worked ludicrous hours to get the footage and effects matched and edited before the deadline, which was an extremely tight schedule.

We made it into the final seven (which means we make it to the DVD!) and were invited to Colchester a few weekends back to attend the premiere of the videos and the announcement of the winner. We all agreed that, from the seven videos shown, we were somewhere about the middle, and that there were videos that deserved to win far more than ours. The video that did win, however, was a piece of pretentious nonsense that was bereft of humour or spirit, as was its creator, who said as part of his acceptance speech (I kid you not): "I'd like to thank my brain." However I don't think we minded losing and a bottle of Bailey's on the train ride home cheered us no end.

Anyway, here is the final vid, take it for all in all, it's something I was proud to be a part of, and proud of the friends who came and helped us out on it.