Eleven Things About The Faded Like A Feeling Music Video You Might Not Know!
Eleven Things About The Faded Like A Feeling Music Video You Might Not Know!
Find a random frisbee...drink!
Eleven Things About The Faded Like A Feeling Music Video You Might Not Know!
Eleven Things About The Faded Like A Feeling Music Video
1. This was the pitch from director Mark Myers for Faded Like A Feeling. We needed a concept that was simple, easy to shoot in a few hours, but still capable of eliciting emotion from the viewer. Here is what Mark sent back:
Simple simple simple concept. But potentially cool and iconic in hindsight …
It all takes place on a swing as a playground.
Tegan is swinging singing the song (slow and moody) - from a couple angles. When Sara enters it’s a seamless transition (tegan swings out of frame, Sara swings in). And they could both be on the swing side by side
(I’m not sure who sings which part yet).
We end on a shot of them on the swing set, and they fade away, leaving the swings swaying on their own
2. We went to work searching for a park. I suggested one in Strathcona, a neighbourhood in Vancouver, at a school that we often walk Georgia at. The park has a chain link fence around it and I thought maybe getting permission to shoot there would allow us to control the environment a bit. But Mark didn’t love the look of it. We talked about a few other parks, but in the end, Mark chose Hastings Mill, a beautiful, lush park with a really cool wooden swing set that Mark was desperate to shoot on. We secured a permit and crossed our fingers! How hard would it be to shoot in public!?
3. Although we had a permit to shoot on the swings at Hastings Mill Park, we couldn’t control the world around the swing set. As I feared, making a music video in a public park at dusk in August is more complicated than even the most complicated scenario you can imagine at 3 am while you’re lying awake worrying about shooting a music video in a park at dusk in August. Our very nice manager Christine had to encourage people to move out of the frame every five minutes and it was both funny and stressful. She mostly succeeded and Mark cleverly shot around those that wouldn’t move — switching direction mid-shot to avoid flying frisbees — but some people still made it in the video. I encourage you all to watch just to try and spot all the funny shenanigans happening in the background. One person you won’t see is a woman who would not leave the frame when Christine asked. The woman insisted multiple times, very loudly, that she would not move because she was “here to watch the sunset,” even though it’s a giant park with acres of grass. Sadly, the moment with her in the video was too beautiful to cut so she was in our final edit. But then Mark removed her with some editing magic and so she is no longer there. HA!
4. I had to work hard not to feel self-conscious during the three hours we were shooting. There were a lot of “looky-loos” (people wandering over to see what we were doing) which only intensified my embarrassment. Sometimes being a musician is ridiculous. My favourite looky-loos were a duo of boys who seemed to be about ten-years-old. They came running up at one point and said, “You sing the Lego song right?” I said “yes” and the other boy said, “What are you doing here?” An excellent question!
5. Mark surprised us with a fog machine and fifty feet of black tubing to disperse the fog around the playground. This created a misty fog-like look, adding to its cinematic quality. I witnessed many dad types, hands on hips, surveying the fog machine with interest. I was very impressed too but had my hands gripping the chain of the swing, so I couldn’t put my hands on my hips.
6. I found out quickly that swinging back and forth on a swing set for three hours will make you motion sick! There was no time for breaks as we were shooting in the last few hours of sunlight, so I had to swallow back nausea and just keep going; I nearly retched in the bushes a few times though. When Sara joined the shoot and I had my first break from swinging I sprinted to the hair and make-up area – a pile of bags next to the bushes – and slammed back a mint and a few handfuls of chips (all our wonderful team had with them) to try and settle my gut. It didn’t help. But I did however make it through the shoot without barfing.
7. Mark used a drone to get an aerial shot in the bridge which is one of my favorite moments in the video. It was so cool seeing the drone up close and the footage is so epic! I always thought drones were annoying, but I might now have to get one.
8. This has nothing to do with the Faded Like A Feeling Video but once when Sara and I were three, our dad took us to the park before dinner to go on the swings. He would often put one of us on his lap, facing him, our legs wrapped around his waist, and swing super high. We would wail and scream with joy. We loved to be afraid. While one of us was on the swing, the other would wait her turn. But on this night, in particular, Sara wandered out while my dad and I were flying high and, in a panic, my dad thrust his feet into the ground to stop us before we hit Sara. This probably saved her from grave injury. But when he did this, he forgot to hold onto me, and I went flipping through the air and landed on my face in the dirt. I was pretty scraped up but if I know my dad, I’m sure he picked me up and said, “Anything broken? No! Let’s get back on the swing. Life lesson for you all! If it ain’t broken, keep going!”
9. Faded Like A Feeling is actually in a movie that came out a few months ago called Crush! The movie was directed by Sammi Cohen, who co-directed the video for our song 100x with Jess Rona. The movie is gay! And directed by a gay woman! And it’s great and so sweet! I highly recommend you go watch it. Another fun fact: We originally were going to cut a video together with footage from the movie, but we ran out of time and so we shot the swing set video instead.
10. I did not cut my hair into a mullet, or dye it black for the video! I’m wearing a wig. I did this for two reasons. The first is that in January I cut my hair quite short so Sara and I’s hair looked very different. In March, Sara came to LA to shoot a music video for Fucking Up What Matters, and take photos with Pamela Littky for the Crybaby album artwork. We wanted some variety in the photos, so we had a wig made to look like Sara’s hair to ensure I had a couple of different looks in the photos. The brilliant Pamela Neal was enlisted to do hair for the shoot and create my wig! Pamela had Sara take photos of her hair, so Pamela could dye the wig to match to Sara’s hair. But the photos Sara took, made her hair look dark, when in fact it was quite a bit lighter. When I went to the salon in LA to get the wig cut, we figured out it was too dark but decided to roll with it anyway!
When we set out to shoot the video for Faded Like A Feeling a few weeks ago I had the idea in my head that we might use a photo of me in the wig for the single artwork. So I decided to wear the wig for the video so it all tied together. I also thought it might make the video more surreal if Sara and I looked more alike in the video. And I think it does!
11. While the video shoot was a bit stressful due to time constraints, budget constraints, and my nausea, it was mostly fun. We put together a really amazing team of creatives to make this video, Yellow and the upcoming videos for I Can’t Grow Up and Smoking Weed Alone. While they are the smallest video team we’ve worked with in years, they are so incredible, and everyone has been so helpful and creative and fun to be around! I said this in another post, but I’d obviously prefer we had more money to ensure people get paid what they deserve, and so we could have more hands-on set to help. But it has been really fun to return to DIY art making. Massive gratitude to the entire team for helping us make this video. Another shout out to Christine, our manager, who watched the iPad monitor to make sure we looked okay, herded people out of the frame when they came too close, and carried a 15-pound speaker in one hand, blasting the song for us to lip sync to at the same time. Fucking legend. Please support us and them and Christine by watching!
-Tegan
Eleven Things About The Faded Like A Feeling Music Video You Might Not Know!