The Filming Of “I Don’t Know Birds That Well” …

This post is all about the making of the music video for our song “I Don’t Know Birds That Well“.

We filmed this in two different locations, during our first ever trip to the UK back in 2013. We had been staying in London for a few weeks planning to familiarise ourselves with the music scene there, shoot some videos and visit a few radio stations. One morning we got invited on a morning show for BBC Radio Devon with John Govier which took us south-west to Plymouth, a 4 hours’ drive from London.

Prior to that we had spent days unsuccessfully scanning Google Maps and our neighbourhood for a possible video location for “I Don’t Know Birds That Well”.

It came as a total surprise when Michaela’s screams of joy woke us from our car-ride beauty sleep when she spotted this remote little chapel on the way back home from Plymouth!

We stopped to check it out and decided then and there that it was the ideal location for us to film the music video and make full use of our drone.

We marked the spot in the sat nav and drove back to London only to return a few days later. We left our home in the middle of the night so that we would be ready to shoot at sunrise.

As it was still so early in the morning it had been rather cold and windy. We tried to keep warm by wrapping up in some blankets and seeking shelter in the chapel between takes. The building also seemed to be the home of a pair of white doves. They were absolutely beautiful and couldn’t be more fitting for a video about birds!

We filmed many different scenes on top and around the beautiful hill as well as in the chapel. The task at hand wasn’t exactly easy: Dad had to navigate the drone, guessing what Michaela would see in her goggles, which she used to operate the camera, guessing where Dad would fly next. Just in time before divorce papers where filed and before the empty batteries would cause a crash landing of our camera bird, we decided we had all the scenes we needed 🙂

Some days later we stopped by at a park in Saffron Walden, an hour north of London, where we had discovered some perfectly sized trees to climb up in and a huge meadow to laze around on, where no dogs and children would disturb Dad’s jelly-legged ninja-walk around us with his camera to get some smooooth shake-free shots.

This time we had a sunny and pleasant afternoon which made for a beautiful, warm sunset light.

If you haven’t seen the final video yet, please feel free to watch it by clicking on the video below.

And again, click on the video on the very top of the page to re-watch the making-of and follow us behind the scenes.

Stay groovy,
Mona & Lisa