Two days ago, I wrote a blog about the launch of our brand new music channel, FA Music TV. Today, I'm doing a little self-promotion by highlighting the latest music video I shot for singer/songwriter Hee Young's Buy Myself A Goodbye from her album, 4 Luv. I was lucky that Hee Young let me choose the song we wanted to do a video for, and I thought Buy Myself A Goodbye was the most visual track on the album. Hee's lyrics are very expressive and honest. "I'll buy myself a goodbye; and then sell it to someone who really needs..." made me think of things that we can't buy with money. So, I said, "What if you walked around the city, attempting to buy things that are un-purchasable?" And what do you picture when you think about money? Dollar bills. But not the dollar bills you keep in your wallet. We're talking about the ones you use to purchase houses and hotels when you play Monopoly.
Hee Young and I developed the idea over a few days and got down to shooting. This was (as you'll see in the video) back when it was warm out. Summer vacations got in the way, and we ended up having several different shoot dates indoors and outdoors. We shot the interiors at the Film Annex studios and the exteriors in different neighborhoods in New York City, including Times Square, West Village, Park Slope, and Coney Island. This was before Sandy hit the coast of New York and Coney Island was still pretty.
I think one of the most fun things about making the video was perceiving the lyrics literally and then trying to create a rather surreal story that's open to interpretation. I love images, but I'm equally fascinated with words, and making a music video is the perfect medium for combining the two. My favorite shoot day was the one on Coney Island even though it was a very early morning shoot. The stores were closed and no one was around. It was quite peaceful.
I had a great time working on this project and felt challenged at times, handling all aspects of production including camerawork, directing, editing, and even set design. My awesome co-worker, Alexey, helped me with the "movie-within-a-movie" scene in the video, so a big thank you goes to him, and of course to Film Annex (more special thanks in the credits). I guess I'll let the video speak for itself, but if you're curious about any of the scenes, the making-of, where ideas came from, etc., I'm happy to go into details. You can watch the video below. I hope you enjoy it! P.S. 720 is always better :)
Music: 'Buy Myself A Goodbye' from 4 Luv by Hee Young
Produced by Saul Simon MacWilliams
Directed, Filmed, and Edited by Eren Gulfidan (www.mumfus.com)
Second Camera: Beyza Boyacioglu
Special Thanks: Lillian Rodriguez, Alexey Levhcenko, Film Annex
More about Hee Young:
"A beautiful example of what music is all about” is how the UK’s THE MAG describes Hee Young’s debut EP ‘So Sudden.’ Produced by Saul Simon MacWilliams (Chris Garneau), mixed and mastered by Dan Romer (Ingrid Michaelson, Jenny Owen Youngs), and self-released in 2009, ‘So Sudden EP ’ was picked up by South Korea’s biggest Indie label Pastel Music in 2010. ‘Are You Still Waiting?’, the title track of her EP won the Singer/Songwriter Awards of We Are Listening in 2010 and was featured in Korea’s hit TV show ‘Lie To Me’ which created a buzz not only in Korea, but internationally, resulting in dozens of fan videos even before the release of the official music video.
Born in a small seaside town to a singer mother and a composer father, Hee Young grew up in Seoul, South Korea. At age sixteen, she left home to fulfill the American Dream, but after a year spent in a middle of nowhere town in South Georgia in the land of endless cotton fields, she found herself alone with no high speed Internet or a television and no close friends and family, but an old piano and a slight Southern accent. That’s when she started speaking the language of loneliness and unrequited love and matching them to her own melodies.
10 years later, she’s a young Brooklyn transplant with a degree in Studio Composition from SUNY Purchase Music Conservatory and is a signed artist of South Korea’s Pastel Music. With an EP under her belt, Hee Young’s first full-length record ‘4 Luv’ (Produced by Saul Simon MacWilliams) was released in the spring of 2012."
Download the song and the album '4 Luv' here.
-- EREN
