Gather 'round, folks. Story time with Uncle Thunder, here. A telling of a peculiar, but fascinating once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Sometimes, life throws you an opportunity to do something, that seems very unreal. It's not like winning the lottery, but it's close enough.

Five years ago, my school was working on a play to show for our families and any locals. It was quite a lot of work, considering that we only had a week to prepare all the props, write the scripts, learn songs, make costumes, etc. I was all over the place during that period. Unlike the year before, when I just was part of that play's music crew, I was helping with the script and had to act and read lines for the first time, in addition to playing the music.

One day after lunch, our music teacher calls the band in for a short meeting. He had just received an invitation for us to participate in a music video for a well-known Danish band called Carpark North. They were going to celebrate their 20th anniversary by doing a music video in the efterskole, where they first met and became friends. To make it a bit more special, they invited five other efterskoles to their school in Mellerup and play their biggest hit Transparent And Glasslike with 'em.

Naturally, we were excited by the prospect of joining such a production (even though none of my bandmates really knew Carpark North, to my bemusement), so after we were done with the play, we threw ourselves into practicing the song (when we weren't doing schoolwork anyway).

My recollection is that we all practiced our parts individually and only rehearsed together three-four times before the day of the shoot. At that time, I was very much into playing drums. I was pretty much an amateur, but I had timing (somewhat), so I could play. Loudly. So to practice my drum parts (and spare my band's hearing), I went to the studio room to play on an electronic drum kit. We weren't given much reference to learn the song from, so I used the studio version to play along to.

Day of the Shoot

Thursday, February 28th, 2019.

We all loaded our gear into the slightly-broken-but-still-working "bus" (actually a small Renault van) and then drove off to Mellerup. When we arrived, we noticed some bigger buses than ours. As we were ready to unload our "bus", a cameraman approached us and asked us to drive around and come back with him on the backseat to film our arrival, and after that, we went to unload our gear at the gym, the location of the shoot. The band was already shooting some takes with a few bands from the school, but we weren't interrupting. After all, the video concept was built on the band starting to play alone, while more and more bands joined in, so this was also filmed.

I remember being a bit nervous before the shoot, because I was still struggling to keep in time with the drums. Even knowing that it would be playback, the idea of multiple drummers playing the same thing at the same time to the same beat seemed to be somewhat of a daunting task. Especially, when it ended on being 20 bands from 6 different schools. Because our school was a small all-around-type efterskole, our one band was really all that our school could contribute to this, compared to the others that specialized in music performance. Luckily, I got introduced to the marvelous technology of in-ear monitors. With these, I could block most of the noise out and really focus on the song and the click.

To Make A Music Video Is To Play It To Death

As soon as all the bands were set up to play, and after some instructions about the start cues from (what I presumed) the director, we went ahead with a rehearsal take without Carpark. After that, the band was queued in to play with us next, but the director (I presume?) thought of surprising them with all of us performing the song just for them. A very cool moment for us and them. They even joked afterwards, if they could just go home now. Clearly, good vibes were shared by everybody in the soon-to-be-hot gym. And then, the shoot went on...

If you were wondering, how long it takes to make a music video, then I can say for this shoot, we were at Mellerup for 8-9 hours. 6-7 of those hours was playing the track, over and over again. Part of the reason was for the camera crew to capture every possible angle of all 20 bands (and there was a lot to cover). After the first 4 takes or so, I started to see some of the guitar players getting shirtless, which I did as well, as it was getting hot and sweaty. But we were later told to not change any part of our outfits, afterwards, to avoid any continuity errors. Because of the weight of my in-ear monitors, I did need to tape the wires to my back, just to not lose the click and timing. As we went on, there was also a couple of varied takes to do. One take was all in the dark with flashing lights, which went unused. Another bizarre one was an drums-only recording. Well, bizarre for everyone, but the drummers. All of us bashers drummers still had the backing track in our ears to play along to, but not for everyone else sitting around. They had no idea what was happening, when we all suddenly started playing to (for their ears) nothing. At the time, I thought nothing of it, until I saw footage of it. Definitely an unique experience. After the production crew got enough shots of every band together and we all did a big group photo, we realized that all was not over yet. Extra shots of other bands entering the room was done, as well as a recording of all the vocals only, thus concluding the entire shoot of a song played well over 20 times in one day.

The Aftermath

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019

I was pretty sure that everyone involved was kind of burned out by Transparent. I could feel that from my bandmates, who didn't want to play, listen or quite frankly discuss the track ever again. However, we were anticipating the eventual release of the video. Then one month later, it was released on the band's SoMe platforms. I discovered it in the forenoon and instantly messaged it to our teacher. But it was sort of bittersweet. Our entire school was gathered to watch the video, and we did get a pop, when we appeared on-screen. For about 5 seconds....

....and that was it.

Personally, I kind of expected a bit more of us. I did understand at the time of how much you needed to condence and sacrifice down to 4 minutes, but 5 seconds was just too little of us. Granted, It could have been less, and well, I fine with it now.