UK-based pop/punk band Slackrr recently released their new single “Never Forget.” The track is off their upcoming album, which is set for release via SBAM Records this summer.
In the video for Never Forget, hand-puppet versions of the three band members take a trip through London, see a show and return to their rehearsal space, where they run into the live-action band members before stealing their van. According to Slackrr bassist Cait Bowyer, who shot and edited the project, the shoot spanned just a single day, with props, such as the puppets and cinema box, made in advance.
“The three of us spent the day moving around the different locations, and this was the part that took the longest, as we were going from our rehearsal room in Southampton to getting on a train, going to the cinema and back again,” she reveals. “We literally had to do the route that the puppets were taking and find different ways to film them in all the different places.”
The video was shot entirely using a Samsung Galaxy A54 Android phone.
“We wanted this to be as DIY as possible, and using a phone actually made a lot of the outdoor shots easier, particularly when the puppets were in motion, like when we wanted to make it look like they were walking down the street or onto the train platform,” she explains. “It also made filming puppets on a busy train from Southampton look a bit more subtle!”
The video was then edited using Microsoft Clipchamp.
“We didn’t need anything particularly advanced for this one because, again, we wanted to make sure it was as easy and DIY as possible.”
That said, Bowyer and the team still ran into a few challenges.
“The video was so much fun to film, but one of the hardest bits was the actual puppeteering work,” she notes. “We had to work together to make sure that the three of us weren’t in view of the shot at any time, so (guitarist/vocalist) Scotty and (drummer) Louis had to do a lot of weird walking with and sitting down on the pavement to keep the puppets above their heads and moving.”
The “cinema” she adds, was also a challenge, as the puppets needed to appear as silhouettes in front of the movie screen.
“At the end of the video, we had to get the puppets to look as if they were sitting in our tour van, so Louis had to crawl pretty uncomfortably into the footwell of the van and hold the puppets up in front of the window. I also think Scotty’s hat and sunglasses would fall off his puppet’s head pretty often, and I think if you watch the video closely, you can see where we added a few of those shots just because we thought they were funny.”
Slackrr is on Facebook and Instagram.