New "Things Under Trees" lyric video from They Stole My Crayon

I thought you might like a little "behind the scenes" from the making of They Stole My Crayon's first official video... which is really just a lyric video until we decide to do actual videos, but that's another story. First, here's the video:


As I've written about, we finished a pre-release mix of "Things Under Trees" a week ago, over Labor Day weekend. Yesterday (Saturday September 6), Christina and I decided to see if we could whip together a cool lyric video that would be easy to do but still captured the eerie vibe of the song. We headed just up the street to Dominguez Park here in lovely Redondo Beach, CA, which has a variety of nice, big trees (which, for pretty obvious reasons, would be essential to the creation of the video). Christina and I both filmed, which took a total of maybe 15 minutes. I think we already knew what we had in mind, so capturing the footage was straightforward.

Christina captures some footage from a ground-level position. She also had the excellent idea to get some high-resolution slow-motion shots of the trees in the wind which came out fantastic.

I could have used a simple font for the lyrics on the video, but decided to handwrite them instead. I wrote out each line of the song in a drawing application on my iPad called Paper. Then I brought those into Photoshop on the Mac and turned them into "green screen" images so that the writing would be opaque with the backgrounds invisible.

Here's one way to do interesting titles for your videos... turn your page into a chroma-key green screen and throw them in.

Finally, I put the footage and lyrics art together with the song in iMovie -- yes, you can push iMovie to do more than edit your family vacation videos -- then some editing to make things interesting, and that was that. The whole process was done in half a day. We're all happy with the way it came out, and it's exciting having some actual music and imagery out there that we can show to people, finally.