The Florin Street Band: “My Favourite Time of Year”
“The Florin Street Band” was put together by contemporary composer Leigh Haggerwood to record an original Christmas song he had written called “My Favourite Time of Year”.
His idea was to have the music video in a 19th century English setting with with period costumes, snow covered streets and rooftops lit by old fashioned lantern light.
He could not get the backing of any record companies to produce it as they did not think it would prove financially viable.
Leigh decided to go ahead and produce it himself and managed to get the help of 36 musicians including the English Chamber Choir.
British director Nick Bartleet helped to make the video a reality and as plans progressed, American cinematographer John Perez offered his services as Director of Photography.the extraordinary video was shot at Blists Hill Victorian Town at Ironbridge in Shropshire. Since their release in 2010, the song and video have received an unprecedented public response through social networking websites with many people describing it as a future classic.
Text Santa
Text Santa is a charity initiative that aims to raise money and awareness for nine charities over the festive season. The producers were keen to use “My Favourite Time of Year” as the theme music for the appeal, which Leigh agreed to. The Text Santa appeal was first broadcast by UK’s television network ITV in 2011.
As a gesture of good will, Leigh decided to donate all profits from UK downloads of the song in 2011, to the nine Text Santa Charities, along with the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust which was the location of his Victorian museum video, and a supporter of the Florin Street Band.
Florin Street Website: www.florinstreet.com
The charities supported are:
Carers UK
Crisis
Samaritans
wrvs
Help the Hospices
Yorkhill Children’s Foundation
Helping Hand Charity
Noah’s Ark Appeal
Great Ormond Street Hospital Childrens Charity
OK Go: This Too Shall Pass
This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg Machine
“This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg Machine” was the second video done for OK Go’s album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”. The single was released in January 2010 and the band made the unusual decision to create two official videos for the album, both of which premiered on YouTube.
The first video records a live performance of the song in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Marching Band. For the second the band wanted “a giant machine that we dance with”.
It features a four-minute sequence of a song being played in time to the movements of a giant Rube Goldberg machine built over two storeys of a warehouse.
Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson Dance in their Graves
Rube Goldberg is the American equivalent of Britain’s Heath Robinson. American inventor and cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) was famous for his cartoons of intricately complicated over-engineered machines that manage to perform very simple tasks in hundreds of unnecessary mechanically inspired movements.
The sequence is carefully orchestrated but appears to be a single shot, following the convoluted route of objects along the machine. The contraption consists of more than 700 household objects which create a route estimated to be over half a mile long.
Parts of the machine are synchronised in time with the music, with members of the band singing alongside the machine and being shot at by paint guns in the grand finale.
This Too Shall Pass on YouTube
The video “This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg Machine” appeared on YouTube on 2nd March 2010 and was viewed over 900,000 times on its first day, and reached 6 million views in six days…it has now been viewed over 30,876,540
times.
It was named both “Video of the Year” and “Best Rock Video” at the 3rd annual UK Music Video Awards
The Band: OK GO
The lead singer of the band Damien Kulashwas was attending the Interlichen Arts Camp to study graphic design and while there met, met the bassist Tim Nordwind who was there to study music. The name “OK GO” was inspired by their art teacher saying: “OK…Go! while they were drawing.
Kulash and Nordwindmet the band’s former guitarist and keyboardist Any Duncan in high school, and their drummer and percussionist Dan Konopka in college, and launched the band in 1998.
In 2005 Andy Ross – guitar, keyboards and vocals, joined them and replaced Andy Duncan.
Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of “This Too Shall Pass” off of the album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”. The video was filmed in a two-story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Syyn Labs ( http://syynlabs.com/ ) over the course of several months.
You can share your views on this video or the band OK Go on our music forums:
To find out more about the making of the video, the an in-depth behind-the-scenes setup of the warehouse can be seen at:
http://www.okgo.net/this-too-shall-pass-rube-goldberg-machine/
OK Go on Tour http://www.okgo.net/shows/
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