Enfnts Terribles

Maxim Meyer-Horn

9 Dec 2020
Music

Ellington Gives Us Some Insights On His New Music Video for ‘EMT’

Los Angeles based musician Ellington has toured the world with his music. The drummer is best known for being part of the poprock band R5 and toured with The Driver Era, but he’s ready to relaunch himself as a solo artist. For his new music video “EMT”, he explains us the inspiration behind the visuals with some selfmade shots of props and locations.

I had just proposed to my fiancé before shooting this video and our friend made this arrangement. Since at the time they were dying we saved a few to dry out and used the rest as a prop.

This is me filming the scene where the red Ellington ghost jumps out of my body.. yeah.. I had no idea if the shot would work because I had only done some film editing in high school and I had never used a green screen before, but luck had it that it did work and that me laying in the middle of my street at 2 in the morning wasn’t a complete waste of time.

My single cover for “EMT” is me sitting in front of a make-shift replica of my studio in front of a spray painted backdrop, so I wanted to incorporate that into the music video. This is to the lyric “I want some time I can kill” in which we discussed many options including painting a knife through a clock, which proved to be too morbid so we went with just spraying the word “time” with a horror-like “I” then ripping through it for that Jack Nicholson “Here’s Johnny” effect.

We filmed all guitar shots either in my living room or on my literal bed with my friend Oliver holding the ring light camera and strobing with this hand held flashlight, simultaneously. I hadn’t performed in any way with a guitar in over 10 years so I was curious what would happen, but it felt like a natural reunion.

This is an action shot where I told my fiancé to throw the flowers at my face as hard as she could. I felt like one of those crazed directors they portray in films that take their work too far and get too methodical. I’m just glad no thorns got me.

It was hard explaining that I wanted to be pulled on a dolly behind my jeep while singing into the back up camera but here we are.. This was the second night and the dolly proved to be much louder than we expected and we were sure we were going to be pissing off our neighbors. But luckily we got what we needed in about two takes.

 

This is a photo we didn’t use in the process of making the glitchy mid air guitar shots. I chose 2 photos out of about 300 and sliced them together into a sort-of gif to emulate the look of those 3D cameras.

After editing the video once through we showed it to some friends and decided to change some things based on their notes. This is me having an existential crisis after two weeks of editing and 1 week of shooting. This was the beginning of the final night.

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