Nothing Is In Vain – a journey to the stars and back …

The making of “Nothing Is In Vain” was by far the most time consuming and most elaborate of all our video productions up to that point. It took us over a year to film all the different parts and another few months to master the editing required to get the effects across the right way. But talk about a labour of love 🙂 If you don’t know the song or finished video yet, please make sure to watch it here before reading on, since this post is all about the making-of.

Where to start?

“Nothing Is In Vain” ended up being the most psychedelic song off our debut album. It’s also the closing track. So we always knew that the video had to be … out there.

Out … where? Well as out out as possible. Space? Ideally! How? Well, let’s try something …

Soon we were setting up flood lights in our back garden at 2am and started throwing guitars through the air and attempted backflips on our trampoline. Camera pointed towards the stars, set to super slow motion.

After throwing everything from instruments, to liquids, to tools, to a raw fish that Michaela intended to cook for dinner, to ourselves in front of the lens we decided we had enough slow-motion footage to make 3 full length feature films. Of course, hardly anything made it into the final cut, but if you ever need an hour’s worth of video of a beachball rotating through space in slow-motion, give us a call.

So, we went to space on a budget. Where next? Having been all the way up, it was now time to go all the way down. Underneath the deep blue sea that is.

Or rather … Mind if we go for a midnight swim at yours, nan?

We turned our grandparents’ pool into a “black hole” (using lots and lots of dark fabric) and decided to do the filming there. Thanks for letting us ♥

First, we jumped into the pool backwards which proofed to be quite the challenge. With only one try each to nail it, the stakes were high (the jump really wasn’t).

Then we spent about an hour in the water, equipped with little diving weights to keep us submerged. We could only shoot a breath-length at a time but we still got some surreal, weird looking shots out of it – exactly what we were after! It was well worth the burning eyes, aching lungs and blue lips.

We’re done now! … right?

Far from it. Now the real work lay ahead. How to combine the flying fish, floating hair, and exploding watermelons into something useful? There isn’t much to tell you about the next few months other than that a lot of “After Effects” tutorials were watched, many hours were spent on “keying out” backgrounds and the occasional word of frustration echoed through our house.

But it was all worth it because by the end of it, we had a video unlike anything we’ve ever done before …