I travelled to Myanmar, (formerly known as Burma) back in 2013 to shoot and direct this music video for the pop star 'Smile'.
I bought one of my Red Epic cameras and a set of lenses. I picked up local crew and basic lighting and grip equipment.
I took advantage of a local nightclub for the dance scenes. We had a great group of enthusiastic extras. Communication was challenging, but I managed to control the club's lighting fixtures. I also supplemented the disco lights with beauty lighting on Smile and her onscreen partner.
The bulk of the performance was at the beautiful park location, that I shot past dusk... until we were ordered out by the security guards.
For the second performance scene I had the lighting team make up festoons of lightbulbs in a semi covered location. We only had the location during the day, so I blacked out two sides, used the ambient daylight for fill and keyed with HMI's.
It was a challenging shoot. We had limited access to locations, and no art department. The local crew that I had were a great bunch. We had very limited resources, but everyone was there to help and solutions were always found.
