With a scribbled-on piece of paper in hand, Brendan Henry was ready to shoot a music video.
Henry, owner of Summerside's Minotaur Creative Agency, was recruited late last year by Summerside musician Andrew Waite to film a video for his new single, Ain't Goin' out Like That.
For the last three years, Henry and Waite, who is from Summerside but lives in Charlottetown, have collaborated on music videos together, but not in the circumstances of a global pandemic.
"Andrew approached me in the fall of 2020. At the time, productions were still iffy, and I didn't want to end up booking a crew and locations to then be faced that we couldn't go anywhere off-Island or do anything. So I decided to pull creativity from people's interpretations of the song and create the video digitally."
By digitally, Henry means with a green screen in his kitchen and Waite's garage.
He said there were opportunities for studio work but opted for a 'do more with less' approach.
"From my point of view, the story behind the music video was Andrew is stuck in a house with a better version of himself. That version keeps trying to give him something good, but he's just not quite getting it."
As filming got underway, it was clear a whole lot of imagination was going to be involved.
"It was a weird one to shoot," Waite said with a chuckle.
"In the opening shot, I'm pulling up in a car. In reality, I was sitting on a lawn chair in front of a sheet. Then in another shot where there were two paintings on either side of me - those paintings were really Brendan and his wife, Brianna, holding up a piece of paper so I'd know where to look."
Explaining the song, Waite said he and fellow writers Colin MacDonald and Chris Kirby intended the song to be about "a situation where somebody is not pulling their weight and they're being a drag, but you're not going to let them get you down."
An unintentional interpretation is a referral to 2020.
Waite says listeners have asked if he was talking about the year that was 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The single is in advance of his next record, expected to come out later this year.
Waite and Henry are both pleased with the way the video turned out.
"Some of the more simple shots really resonated with me. Shots with him with the guitars, smoke in the windows, the way those shots turned out really impressed me... considering what I worked with it looks pretty damn good," Henry said with a chuckle.
Henry said 175 shots went into making the video that would have to be layered and rendered in production.
"The sheer number of shots was not obvious to me when we started. This was nothing I'd ever done before. But I've learned a lot in this process."
The video for Ain't Goin' out Like That was released on Feb. 5.
