The competition

In 2023, I ran a competition to give an emerging musician the chance to have a fully produced music video made for free. It's something I've done to support new talent, particularly artists who have brilliant music but don't necessarily have the budget to give it the visual treatment it deserves.

The winner was Eleanor Kane.

Her song, Wasted Time, stood out immediately. A powerful, bluesy ballad, beautifully produced by Ali Robertson, with a voice that made me sit up and pay attention.

The remarkable thing was that this was her debut release. Not a bad way to introduce yourself.

Finding the story

Eleanor already had an idea for the video when she approached me.

But first, here's how she described the song:

"'Wasted Time' is all about showing your ultimate vulnerability with someone intimately but then still not being able to love them emotionally, wishing you could love that person as much as you want them and all the weird feelings that come about as a result. The song says 'woman' a lot, and in the time since I wrote it I've gone through some gender identity stuff, so I want to explore that side visually."

Her original concept involved one continuous shot revolving around her. During the middle eight, when the music breaks down, the video would reveal a more vulnerable version of Eleanor, wearing minimal make-up, nude shorts and a crop top.

I liked the simplicity of it, but I felt the song had more storytelling potential.

There were some wonderfully visual lines in the lyrics, particularly about watching someone get up to leave and being unable to tear your eyes away from them. They gave me something to build on.

So I took Eleanor's idea and developed it into three scenes.

The first would take place in a bedroom with a man. The second would move to a kitchen, the morning after the night before, with a woman. And the final scene would strip away those relationships and characters, leaving Eleanor alone and revealing a more personal side of her identity.

Rather than spelling everything out, I wanted the images to leave room for the viewer to interpret the relationships and emotions for themselves.

We met in a little café near Waterloo Station, talked it through over coffee, made a few tweaks and agreed on the approach.

Now I just had to work out how to film it.

Three scenes, three locations

The bedroom scene was filmed at Eleanor's home in South London. For the kitchen scene, a friend kindly offered us their rather posh kitchen nearby. That left the third scene.

I needed somewhere large, dark and empty. With a conventional production budget, hiring a studio would have been the obvious answer. But this was a competition video, so I had to be a little more inventive.

Luckily, I live on a farm with several enormous barns. The farmer, Daniel, was happy to let me borrow one. Glamorous music video locations don't come much better than a freezing agricultural building in December.

We filmed the barn scene first.

The challenge was making the space disappear into darkness. Any unwanted daylight coming through gaps in the building had to be blocked out.

Kyra, our lighting director, followed me with a single small light as I moved around Eleanor with the camera on a gimbal.

It took a few attempts to get everything right, but the result was exactly what I wanted. In the edit, I was able to darken the remaining background light and make the scene feel even more dramatic.

The other two scenes were relatively straightforward, with Jake and Dima playing the two love interests.

By the end of two filming days, I'd captured the entire music video in three shots.

Which sounds impressively efficient until you discover what I had to do next.

The tricky bit: matching heads

This was the part of the idea that had been keeping me awake.

I wanted each scene to end with a close-up of Eleanor's face, then have the next scene begin with her face in exactly the same position. I also wanted her eyes to open with the first beat of the bar to add a little more drama.

The location would change, the relationship would change, but Eleanor would remain the visual constant.

No elaborate digital face replacement. No spectacular CGI. Just some very precise camera work and an awful lot of planning. The difficulty was that each shot had to be choreographed around the transition.

I needed to know exactly where Eleanor would be at the end of one scene and where she'd be at the beginning of the next. Her head position, the framing and even the lighting needed to work together.

It was a process of trial and error, making small adjustments until I had a take that would match the next one.

And because each scene was one continuous shot, getting the ending wrong meant doing the whole thing again.

It's the sort of detail most people will never notice when watching the finished video.

Which, of course, is rather the point.

The result

I wanted Wasted Time to demonstrate that you don't need to throw the kitchen sink at a music video to make something powerful.

There are no huge sets, complicated visual effects or dozens of different camera angles.

Just three scenes, three shots and a visual idea that supports the song.

We filmed everything over two days and I completed the edit within the same week. That was only possible because I'd worked out how the scenes needed to fit together before we started filming.

And while the transitions were technically the trickiest part, I think the real success was how Eleanor's original concept developed into something that gave the song another dimension.

That's one of my favourite parts of making music videos. An artist arrives with a song and an idea, and together we find a way to turn it into something neither of us would have come up with alone.

Sometimes that involves elaborate locations and big production plans.

Sometimes it involves three shots and borrowing a barn.



Personally, I rather like the barn approach.

Every music video has a story.

Some involve big ideas. Others involve tiny budgets, happy accidents or problems nobody saw coming. Here are a few more stories from behind the camera.

Nate James – Chasin' The Sun

How I turned a freezing Scottish beach into Ibiza, directing the whole thing from 300 miles away.

Nate James – 1Kind

Making a music video from 300 miles away with a phone, a bedsheet and a big idea.

Anthony Hughes – Body Sayin'

A nightclub, a cast of dancers and the decision to throw away an entire opening sequence.