The Saturday Dads video
The next single to be taken from our album is The Saturday Dads. It’s coming out at the end of November, and we asked some young enthusiastic first time directors to make a video for it. It gets its worldwide premiere today on The Line Of Best Fit.
Seeing as it’s a song about going to the park on a Saturday afternoon with my kids, we asked my daughter aged 7 and my son aged 9 to make the video for it. On a Saturday afternoon. In the park. So we gave them a video camera each and told them to just film whatever they wanted to in whatever way they thought looked best. They came up with all the ideas and locations for it and chose what to film and how. Sarah Owen-Jones, who made the Jelly And Jam video for us, filmed them filming it and made the whole thing make sense as a music video. All I really did was star in it and pay for the ice creams.
We filmed it over two days for a couple of hours each day, so it ended up being the quickest video I’ve ever made. Sadly, due to budget restrictions. there were some ideas that we couldn’t film, like buying a Lego Death Star and filming my son playing with it. But I think that might have been less of an artistic suggestion, and more just a way to get me to buy a three hundred pound Lego set. And there was a scene they’d suggested where my son would hurt his knee and have to be taken away in an ambulance, but we decided that it wasn’t really ethical to hoax call the emergency services. Although it would have been a great ending to the video.
I’m so happy with the way it turned out. I think the video they ended up making perfectly captures what The Saturday Dads is about. It’s about not always being able to be there to see your kids as much as you’d like and about trying to make the most of the little time you do have together when you’re with them. It’s about sitting around in parks on Saturday afternoons and feeding your packed lunch to the pigeons, eating ice creams and just watching the world go by until it’s time to be apart from each other again.
It was so much fun to make. I might ask them to make more videos for us. It was all so easy. My only worry was the unflattering angle that I was always being filmed at.
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