Jade Helliwell - Drive
Admittedly, I’m writing about my friendship with Jade Helliwell in reverse here. This is the second project that we’ve collaborated on.
The first was a bunch of promotional videos for her performance at Nashville Meets London 2018 - which I’ll talk about elsewhere - thanks mainly to the work I’d been doing with my best American friend - Sarah Darling.
Drive is Jade’s debut music video. That statement was the beginning of a run-on sentence in my head, but I can’t figure out an ending to it now but I just want to let you all know that.
DEBUT MUSIC VIDEO.
And here she is fresh (ish) off of a tour of Australia, and running from even to event like nobody’s business on the daily.
I headed up to Manchester the night before the shoot - it was a chill drive for the most part, other than the fact that it took me two hours to escape London. Thanks, Rotherhithe Tunnel closure.
I won’t break the drive down mile-by-mile, but I got through a lot of podcasts and full albums. The Dissect podcast season based around Frank Ocean’s discography is heartbreaking and mind-blowing, by the way.
We started the shoot off at a little infinity cove studio for the performance side of things. Pretty straightforward stuff with Jade performing the song solo, allowing me to cover all angles and possibilities. Jade, being the professional that she is, smashed it out of the park - like she does this for a living or something.
We double-checked, and triple-checked that she was happy with the footage, and I too was happy with everything before heading out to do a quick scout of locations for the ‘narrative’ shots of the video before the actor Marco arrived to shoot.
I like getting to know people. Figuring out why they do what they do, all that pretentious-sounding stuff. So, it was great to just hang out with Jade and Luke, her partner/guitarist/all-round chill dude. The two of them have a vast expanse of experience and love of the country music scene - internationally and nationally. Not long ago, they came back from a tour of Australia, which meant I was incredibly jealous of the adventures they had coming up when we shot this video.
Anyway.
Marco arrived. We chatted about what the plan of attack was for the evening as we waited for the sun to dip a little more. Didn’t take long in November. Marco’s had a pretty wild few years of it, playing football pretty well in Sardinia, before looking to do other things and venture out of the world, moving to London then Manchester following opportunities - which seem to flow to him, the good-looking bastard.
It was a pretty breezy shoot, even with the cold weather, and we smashed out all the ideas and shots that we’d talked about in the day, with some B-roll here and there when Jade and Marco were chatting.
Then we were done, Marco was released from the cold Manchester night, and I said bye to Jade and Luke before heading off back towards London.
All in all, it was a fun shoot, getting to hang with Jade and Luke for a minute compared to at Nashville Meets London where they came in and had to shoot off to another performance somewhere else in the country - Portsmouth maybe?
Jade and Luke are incredibly hard-working, and have that friendly Manchurian vibe you hear a lot about. It was like being in Coronation Street for the day, but no-one died, murdered anyone or got arrested.
Thanks for the fun times and opportunities so far, Jade.
