project background for

Trevor Tanner

The British Legend - Trevor Tanner - Live

The phone rang on Sunday, April 20, 2008. It was my older son, Jim. He called to ask me if I would like to go to one of his neighbor's house that afternoon and shoot a video of a guy that sings and plays guitar. Karen and I had no plans so I said I would do that. I loaded up the gear and went to Jim's house. From there we went a couple of houses down the street to a neighbor's house. His name is Kurt and he has his basement nicely decorated as an Irish pub. Jim and I set up the equipment. We are going to do a two camera shoot. Then Trevor shows up, picks up his ten string guitar and starts to play. Almost immediately I am saying to myself, "Who is this guy? He is good." During breaks I start asking him questions and it turns out that he is Trevor Tanner. He has been in several bands in England. He was the front man for a British chart band called The Bolshoi. He got tired of that and quit for awhile. During that time he moved to Florida. Then not too long before our meeting he decided to pursue the music career again, but this time as a solo act. The video that I was making was to be used for the purpose of getting him more engagements. That was the video we made that day. It is called "The British Legend - Trevor Tanner - Live"

Eaten by the Sea - the musicfilme

Trevor has several websites, including trevortanner.com, wikipedia.com and myspace. The MySpace website has samples of his music which I listened to many times. At that time, he was going to release a new CD entitled "Eaten by the Sea". I decided I would like to make a MusicFilme for him. We talked about it and he liked the idea. So on November 28, 2008 Trevor was in Connecticut playing in a club in Torrington. We met there, he signed the release form and so the project began.
The project was shot at Eric Martenson's house in Springfield, in Granby by the Granby Oak and in Branford at Stoney Creek. Ah...Stoney Creek. When you see the sequence of Rebecca in her summer dress dropping the ring into the sea, the temperature was in the single digits. You wouldn't know that to watch her.
In June, about a week before the Connecticut Film Industry Training Program was to begin, I decided to finish this project and not let it linger on. Well, the first day of the film training I met Martha Bradshaw. She is a graphic artist that has done such things as art for comic books. I showed her the film and she very politely told me that the graphics needed to have some attention. During the next two weeks she would make suggestions and I would go home every night and work on them. I would show it to her the next day and she would make more suggestions. After two weeks of this, the transitional graphics were looking good. Thank you, Martha.

"Eaten By The Sea" was shown at the Norwalk Tunnel of Film and on several local television stations.

Eaten By The Sea - the filme

This is the second version of the Eaten By The Sea filme. It came about one day when Jacob Paul Bean, 3D animator and I were working on another project. We discussed the possibility of adding animated wedding rings to the transitions in the song. The result was this new version. My favorite animation is when the ring falls into the water at the end.

Eaten by the Sea - Video Storyboard

A MusicFilme unlike a normal film should be timed with the beat of the music, so I made a video storyboard to get a feel for the shots and timing that was needed. This helped me to compose the video and plan the shoot, but as it turned out most of this fell by the side during editing. At any rate, this sort of planning provided me with way more coverage than what I needed and that is a good thing. The other thing about a MusicFilme that I would like to mention is that it is not a music video. It is a film that is guided by the words and meaning of the song. It is a short movie that expresses the song in visual terms and in a film format. Eaten by the Sea is about a couple that breaks up and explores life before and after that break up.

Eaten by the Sea - Behind the Scenes

This is still in the planning stages and what I would really like to accomplish here is to define the MusicFilme and discuss the role of the video storyboard.