Shine Through - MP3!

Remember how in a previous post I said how 'Room for Improvement' was a rare example of a project that was spontaneous and didn't have the luxury of lots of time for pre-production? Well good(?) things come in pairs I guess!

When Square Enix reached out to me to make a music video for them it broke my heart, but I had to turn them down. I was in the middle of moving house, everything I owned was in boxes and I was just days from loading all of those boxes in to a van. But not only that, we were just a couple of weeks from the game releasing and understandably they wanted something that could release alongside it.

So with a heavy heart I thanked them for reaching out and told them that there was no way I could make them something in time.

Well apparently Square Enix were SUPER keen to work with me because they came back and offered me two extra weeks!

Which, don't get me wrong, was still an incredibly tight turnaround but it was doable. It just needed to be something that needed minimal pre and post production work. No storyboards, no VFX, nada. Well as luck would have it Life is Strange lends itself perfectly to a shoot on location, out in nature, which was something I'd never really tried before and was keen to explore. (The local park dressed as a goose doesn't quite count!)

Honestly I think the stars aligned for me for this project. One of my closest childhood friends, Paul, is an accomplished cinematographer and director, lives near a mountain range, is a licensed drone pilot and happened to have an exactly music video shoot length gap in his schedule at exactly the time I needed it. Without him this project just wouldn't have been possible and I owe him a huge debt. (I also now owe him money because that's how these things work.)

I really wanted to explore the themes of human connection with this piece. In the game Alex has spent her life keeping herself isolated, afraid of connecting with others, and through the events of the game has to learn to connect with others. I think that on some level we can all relate to that feeling.

The spoken word outro wasn't originally part of the plan at all. One morning when Oxygen sent me a new draft of the instrumentation he said words to the affect of:

'So I got a little carried away with the outro... It's a minute long. Should I get rid of it?'

He wasn't joking, he'd made this wonderful ambient soundscape outro to the song but it was a full minute long. It didn't have a beat so I couldn't extend the lyrics over it with a repeated chorus or anything. It was far too nice to simply remove it but it needed something, if nothing else than because what do I fill a minute of music video with with no words?

So I decided to try my hand at some spoken word poetry. I don't write poetry too often but I do enjoy it. The outro to Shine Through was a little tribute to one of my favourite poets Shane Koyczan, who releases his work set to wonderful semi-ambient music with his group 'The Short Story Long' and if you enjoyed my little outro here I really suggest you check them out. ('Shoulders' and 'For Many' are two personal favourites.)

It's always a little nerve racking releasing songs like this one. Emotional content walks a fine line between coming off as sincere and coming off as just plain cheesy. I'm really grateful that so many people have taken this song to heart because that's where I wrote it from. <3