Music videos are short films attached to a musical concept, and one of the most ambitious local projects is now burning up the social media channels.
The Jer Breaks song Come Down won the financial support of Telus and their B.C./Alberta music video production fund. It allowed a Prince George film crew and expatriate P.G. singer-songwriter Breaks to pair up for the production. They decided to add an extra element of local content by filming it in Barkerville, one of the most iconic settings in the region.
"It allowed us to have a lot of production value," said co-director Norm Coyne. "When your concept is 'time travelling steampunk looks for lost love in gold rush ghost town' it has some pretty wild visual possibilities and this funding made it all happen. And who doesn't want to see that story?"
Breaks portrayed the futuristic time traveller, and his lost love was portrayed by Traci Parker. Several actors from the theatrical staff of Barkerville served as support characters, wearing their period costumes inside the preserved gold rush-era buildings and streets of the National Historic Site.
The Telus contribution was about $5,400, which is not a big budget by itself but Coyne said some people involved in the production "made real sacrifices to make sure we stayed on budget in the end" and the result was pleasing to everyone attached.
"I think it serves the song pretty well. Our timelines were tight, we put it together really quickly, and in the end I was really happy with how it served the song," Breaks said. "I've been on the set of a lot of music videos but it was honestly the first time I'd ever been the focus, the central character before. It was neat to be in Barkerville and have the run of it, and be the central character in what was really a mini-film because unlike a lot of music videos, this one was telling a little story.
"When I heard 'steampunk' was the sort of theme I felt 'meh' but I love westerns and as I got there and saw the costumes, and the sets, I got into it a lot more. Traci and I were the only ones supposedly from the future, so the steampunk aspect was not over the top, and they really only used costume touches to show the steampunk thing, it wasn't overplayed at all. I loved it."
Steampunk, for the uninitiated, is a fashion style and pop-culture trend that mixes elements of the Wild West or Victorian times with elements of the industrial or high-tech age. Cowboys with laser guns, petticoats and robots. It has become a beloved subgenre of science fiction.
Coyne said it didn't take much to evoke the steampunk elements - just some costume touches - in a place as endowed with the wild west and industrialism as Barkerville. The biggest challenges were dealing with cold air and snow despite the spring shooting schedule. At that high altitude, it was unavoidable.
However, when your set and acting team are already established for the purpose of storytelling, that helps a filmmaker team parachuting in.
Coyne was partnered on the production design and shooting with Mike Kroetsch, Chad Magnant and they imported expatriate Prince George filmmaker Jesse McKinnon from Quebec to help. That same configuration was behind a trio of prior short films: Defenseless, Through Blood Like Ice and Pig Boy.
"When we first started out, I didn't have any formal training in filmmaking and neither did Chad," Coyne said. "Mike did, and we were just talking one day and I said 'I want to do a project' because I love project-based things to do. Mike said 'well, I've got these short-film scripts I've written. Why don't we film one of those?' And we did - because we live in Prince George. Here, if you want to do something like that, people will support you, the town gets behind you. They see what you want to accomplish, they see the benefits to the community, and they'll give you the help you need."
Through past acquaintances they also knew Breaks, from his days in the Vancouver-based band Redgy Blackout and Breaks's stints as a sideman for other musicians. Right now he is in the touring band of rising country star Dallas Smith.
"Jer is killing it right now," said Coyne. "The timing is great, when you look at how his career is moving, but I had to coerce Jer into it. He doesn't want to be a frontman, he is more comfortable being a sideman and his real passion is being a songwriter. So I had to convince him that this song needed this kind of profile. But it's such a good song, Jer does such a good job of it, he agreed."
"As a songwriter, its nice sometimes to not have to come up with those concepts," Breaks said. "I have done those collaborations for past videos in other bands I've been in, but in this case I was happy to go along with their vision, and it really did turn out well. I love movies, and I've seen what those guys had done in the past with their filmmaking, so I trusted them and it really worked."
He agreed, though, that being a solo artist is not his favourite career path in music. He does love the songwriting craft, however, and knows that a video for a well-received original song is a great way to forward that skill set.
"We got 1,000 views in the first three days," said Coyne.
"My dad even brought it up and he doesn't really spend a lot of time surfing the internet. It seems to have found some popularity," Breaks said.
The Telus grant that enabled this production is also responsible for several other videos for independent acts across the region. Former Prince George musician Daniel Lapp and past Smithers musician Dan Mangan have been past recipients, as have mainstay B.C. performers like Jim Byrnes and David Gogo as well as a trove of up-and-coming stars like performance poet Shane Coyczan, esthetic rockers We Are The City and Dear Rouge, folk-rockers The Lion, The Bear, The Fox, and blues busters The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer, to name only a few.
Local Face Becoming Familiar
Traci Parker's is a face becoming more familiar on the artistic landscape of the city. First, she was seen in the locally produced short film Through Blood Like Ice, then she was featured in the music video for the Jer Breaks single Come Down and if you flip through the pages of the latest edition of The Scene magazine, she plays the role of the villain's girlfriend in a stylish five-page advertising photo narrative.
"I love the arts," she said. "I can't draw or paint or play music, but I am fascinated by the creative process. It's fun to be part of that, and I've been enjoying the acting and modelling part of it, but even just to be there in that environment watching people do their art."
Her first aspiration in the arts is to be a makeup artist for theatre and film. She was one of the makeup staff for the Judy Russell stage production of Evil Dead: The Musical. She works at Razor's Edge in part because it is in that general sector of business.
She is feeling the performer in her start to grow, though, and was not bored but fascinated by the often tedious filming process.
The music video experience especially got into her head. The location was Barkerville set in 1882. The actors were decked out in authentic Barkerville costumes or steam-punk garb (that was her attire, along with Breaks's character), and outside the camera's frame was a troupe of support staff making the story unfold for the screen.
"Seeing it afterwards, all edited together with the music, that was really surreal," she said. "It was the first time I'd ever seen myself in a widely available public medium. People can look me up on the internet now, my family and friends can see this no matter where they are, and that is odd. But it looked fantastic, the video turned out to be awesome."
Being on the screens of the world is a long way from home. Her early childhood was spent in ultra-rural Echo Bay, a coastal community across Johnstone Strait from Port Hardy on Gilford Island. She moved to Fort St. James for high school. She moved to Prince George upon graduation, studied at CNC a bit, and now is working and exploring her artistic options.
"I would love to do more short films but I had an outrageously fun time on the Barkerville shoot and I would love to do more music videos."
