Behind the Scenes: I Am Video Shooting

The idea

The initial idea was to put the band into a very small 4 x 4 meter room, with painted, dark walls for the performance shots. The protagonist (Kai) for the story shots is standing in the same room with clean, white walls. Over the entire story sequences Kai will smear more and more words from the song lyrics on the wall. At some point the protagonist breaks down but then stands up again and breaks through the walls of his “own prison”.

The location

After some location spotting, we found a very cool film studio called Tillypark Studios (www.tillyparkstudios.com) near Ingolstadt, Germany. You should definitely check out these guys, they were so kind and helpful with everything that we just had to perform our song. They completely built a whole professional film set room for us and if we would have done this by ourselves we either would have been bankrupt or couldn’t play the guitar anymore because we would have lost some fingers, haha.

The shooting

We had to shoot the storyline at first, because we needed some shots of Kai in front of the clean walls. I think we spent nearly two hours with different face expressions and stuff but most of these scenes didn’t make the final cut because it looked way too clean in comparison with the band performance shots, but here is a little snippet:

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After that Kai did some shots with Peter where he put the lyrics on the wall with different paint brushes and thick black color.

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Then he had to punch a hole in the wall with his hands for his escape.

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The escape scene was pretty funny because Kai wasn’t able to walk through this small hole that smooth for the first couple of times, haha.

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But then it worked out pretty well.

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The story shots took about four hours to shoot, because we had to stop at some point a couple of times and fill the walls with more lyrics and then continued, otherwise Kai would be still standing in the room, painting the walls, haha.

After some beer/coffee and a lunch break we were able to set up the drums and the lights for the performance shots. Each member was filmed once performing “I Am” and Peter did some shots where he walked around in the room while the whole band was performing.

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The result

We all know that you have seen this video multiple times, but again, we are very proud of what we created together with Peter, Tillypark Studios and with the help of the “Initiative Musik Foundation”, otherwise a video like this wouldn’t have been possible.

And in case you missed it:

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