"The Sun Will Shine"

Joey Briggs' The Sun Will Shine is my first in music video direction.

I had pitched a couple different music videos ideas to Joey which he seemed to like but they were a bit more involved than we had the resources for.  I remember I was driving through LA with Evalena and we had his CD on when it occurred to me to do a really simple music video for The Sun Will Shine, just so we could get something done soon.

The idea was inspired by a few different things, primarily the song itself reminded me of the old 1950's Sun Records albums I was into a few years back when I was listening to a lot of Elvis and Johnny Cash.  Something about the vocal driven, rock and roll simplicity made me picture the recording of the song in old Tennessee side street recording studio.  I thought if we could get a good looking recording studio we wouldn't have to shoot anywhere else, we could use just that one location to tell the story.

Inspiration shot

When I went to shoot some behind the scenes of The Briggs recording their new single "Panic!" the studio they were using, Crafted Recording, struck me as something special but didn't quite have the old fashioned look I wanted.  After browsing some pictures of older recording studios online I realized it really could work, most importantly it was structured the way I needed it, with a large booth and viewing window and the front entrance directly on the other side.  We would have to dress the place up a bit to get more of an old fashioned feel but since I wasn't going for period piece this seemed pretty obtainable.

Inspiration shot

The story I was trying to tell was of a band who is not naturally excited about the recording process and would much rather be on stage in front of a crowd when playing their music.  Their producer, is equally un-enthused, if not disgruntled by his need to produce these day-job recording sessions with unknown bands in order to make ends meet.  Regardless, the band shows up and gets into their first recording and as the music builds the Producer finds a way to motivate them individually and they come together to play a great song, even if still sort of begrudging the process.

My idea for the producer came from the break down in the song where the other instruments cut out and Joey goes full bore vocally, to me the sounds of his voice jumps from melodic to gospel so suddenly it struck me as another person stepping in and singing it.  That's the way I heard it, imagined it it, and wrote it.  So that's what we've got.

Evalena covering logistics

The one green screen shot of the shoot.  The rest of the effects were done by rotoscoping and body doubles.

The gimmick of having Joey play each character was based a couple different things.  Sure, one of the reasons is that it was a funny music video type of thing to do that was reminiscent of my favorite music videos growing up.  Additionally, Joey really does play all of these instruments and the nature of his venture as "Joey Briggs" is a self sufficient one that segregates his perspective and musical style from The Briggs, so it makes sense that each instrument is coming from him.  But more importantly, if you know Joey its very easy to tell he is not a one dimensional type of character and he doesn't embody any one particular stereotype.  He has a layered personality and performs many roles as a musician and as a person which I think was one of the themes of the record that The Sun Will Shine comes from, The Traveling Salesman, Pariah, Me.  My intention was to break these roles down into fully separate characters and have them play off each other in a way I imagine they would if they were different people.

After about 20 hours of straight shooting and several weeks of editing, The Sun Will Shine turned out to be one of the pieces of work I'm really proud of.  Hope you guys enjoy it.



Special thanks to John LaRocca, Jason LaRocca, Terry Larocca, Kyle McCarthy, Michael Reed and Crafted Recording.