Video Director Dustin Haney had a great idea for Matt Stell’s music video for his song, “If I Was a Bar”: a video shot in a bar with about 13 different characters to help tell the story.
How could he accomplish this vision safely, though, with sufficient social distancing in the midst of a pandemic?
His solution was simple: have Matt Stell play every character himself!
“My mind was geared on, ‘What can I do without bar extras or all these different patrons we’d have, including a bartender?’” says video director Dustin Haney. “I had pretty much nobody to work with, so I kind of took that from there and went, ‘Well, what if I just use Matt a bunch of times over?’”
So that’s exactly what they did! Matt Stell, Dustin Haney, and a skeleton production crew used Fleet Street Pub in Nashville and shot Matt’s music video. The video features 13 versions of Matt interacting, creating a comical and entertaining music video for his single.
This is just one of many examples of people in the music industry becoming creative with their content. Many artists have had to expand their horizons in terms of presenting their music so that they can do it safely for everyone involved. Examples also include Cole Swindell doing the moonwalk for the “Single Saturday Night” video and Kane Brown performing for two different live shows in front of different homemade backgrounds.
There are many restrictions right now involving video shoots: masks must be worn at all times except for the actors during their performances, limits to the number of people o set, and the food provided the performers and crew must be packaged individually (as opposed to the normal buffet style on set). Fanatical sanitizing happens before during and after.
Professionals are understandably hesitant to work on a set right now. For those who are willing, work is plentiful, as most live events remain cancelled until 2021.
Still, the restrictions have bred a new creativity among the music community. Stell puts it best when he says, “Necessity is the mother of invention. Figuring out the way that we could do something fun and creative within this space, sometimes it does almost help to have some boundaries to push against.”
