Joshua and William Sims are two brothers from the Atlanta area. They run the multimedia and video production company GlowCreativeStudio. Both are musicians at heart and as such, they launched a creative music project called, One Day Dreamer.
Part of that project included the production of a music video for the song, ‘In The End.’ Take a look at the video below and then check out the short interview I did with Joshua about the concept and production of the video as well as his advice for aspiring videographers/filmmakers:
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1. Tell us about he One Day Dreamer project.
I grew up playing music with my brother William. We had a band, wrote songs, did a little touring, played in Nashville and really pushed for the music career to take off but that didn’t happen. One Day Dreamer is a side project that William and I put together for fun. We have some goals for it, but being “The Next Big Thing” isn’t necessarily one of them. It will be hard to turn something like that down if that happens though. I was a bass player first, way before finding talent behind the camera, so the stage has always allured me.
2. How did you develop the concept around the video for ‘In The End’?
To me, story always starts with the visual. I’m a DP at heart and a director second. I see a great location and instantly the mind starts churning away some possible story of what could happen there. One day while driving to south Georgia, I saw this beautiful farm and it got my wheels spinning with the rough story that is ‘In The End.’
We had been kicking around which song would be best for a video shoot and I was pushing William to debut a different song with a very different direction for narrative. Late one night I got a text from William, “We need to use your farm story for the song In The End.” I was up super early for a shoot the next morning and called him around 7am. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. We went full steam ahead in that direction from then on out.
3. Where did you shoot the video and how long did it take?
We shot all of the narrative in and around Valdosta, Georgia where I grew up. I knew we would have old family friends and contacts there that would help us get locations. We were able to call in favors and get all those locations at no cost.
The pre-production, set design & art direction took more than a month. We did a lot of that up here in Atlanta, and then hauled it down on 2 trailers to Valdosta. The white picket fence was built and painted here and set up there, along with the fake grave markers. We build out the interior scenes with the old couch, the paint was still wet when we started shooting that first take.
We were on set two different weeks in south Georgia, I’d say we had 5-6 days of shooting. With any narrative project, location set up and tear down being the most time consuming piece as usual.
4. What kind of equipment did you use?
My company, GlowCreativeStudio owns Canon 60D’s and a couple of Canon primes 50mm & 85mm, those being my two favorites.
Ikan makes a great should rig, rails and follow focus. It can break down to just rails and follow focus for mounting on a jib which we did very often. Ikan also makes a great little battery powered 7” HDMI monitor, it is nice when you need a larger screen.
There were two different Kessler Cranes on our shoot. We only light with Arri, we had a 1K, a handful of 650’s and 300’s even thought on this project we did pull out a few old 500w stage fresnels when we needed just a little more light. Some of our greatest assets were grip gear, you can never have enough white bounce, or scrims or CTB/CTO for color temp modification. One of the most fantastic pieces of gear that we have purchased over the years is a Interfit 5-1 42” disc on a articulating arm with stand. I think we have 4 of them, and there’s at least one of them on every shoot we work on.
The project was recorded on Technicolor Cinestyle and all of our projects are edited and color graded in Final Cut Pro.
5. What’s the story you want to tell?
I love telling the greatest story ever told, the story of redemption and life altering grace. There are aspects of that in all of my work. I find it very difficult to put the grace that has impacted my life so heavily on the shelf. My personal faith journey finds its way into every story that I seek to tell.
6. What advice do you have for the aspiring filmmaker or videographer?
Put your money in lighting and lenses. Every scene is made or broken with lighting. I would rather see perfectly lit Canon T1i footage rather than badly lit Red or Alexa footage. Also, buy good glass. Good lenses, as long as they are taken care of, will last a lifetime. Technology will change. When I started it was miniDV and DVCPro, then it was 720 HDV, now it’s 1080p DSLR and 4K footage. The point being, the censor changes, the electronics change, the codec changes, but glass is glass. All cameras, no matter the resolution, still work based on very simple camera aesthetics – lighting, focus, depth of field, frame & balance, negative space etc. If you cannot produce quality images with a SD/HD camera, 4K imaging won’t really make your footage better it just takes up more hard drive space.
While we are on practice, I’d say do free work until you can charge, then charge fair prices and treat your clients with respect. Don’t be afraid to wrestle the bear if it means a really great portfolio piece that will get you bigger and better clients. Get out there and do something, pursue your dreams, it gets harder and harder as you get older, but its so worth it.
If you’ve got a story to tell, tell it.
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