As one of the new generation of Shetland bands just breaking through into the public's view, Sparticus Crumb have been busy recording demo matterial under the expert eye of Flavour Productions contributor Willie Barker of Shetland Music Studio

As music videos are normally considered to be much too expensive for unsigned bands we thought we would see just what kind of video we could make on a very limited budget.

By careful planning in the storyboarding stage we came up with an idea that could be filmed very quickly all in one location, and the next sunny day we headed off to the far north.

We arrived to find that the band had been taking the rock and roll lifestyle a bit too far, and we'rent feeling at their most energetic. Luckily we had to wait an hour for the tide to turn, and by that time they had mostly gotten back into their strides.


For this video we had come up with the idea of burrying the band on the beach, and filming them playing as the tde came in. A series of takes were filmed, from different viewpoints, and concentrating on different band members, while the song played back on CD to syncronise each take.

Back in the studio the takes were lined up against the music track and locked in time, giving the chance to edit the video as though it were a multi-camera shoot.

After the video had been through the inital editing the shots were then all digitally processed, firstly to pull out the full quality of the individual images, and then to pull everything together visually, giving the video a consistant style and a distinctive look while optimising the output for TV viewing.

Music videos are more and more a deciding factor in bands breaking into the market, helping gain gigs, recording deals and distributors.

The production of this video shows that by scripting the idea realistically, and using carefully thought out filming techniques a music video can be made to broadcast quality for only a few hundred pounds.