The Making of “I Am Not Shaken”

With my latest video poem “I Am Not Shaken” about to be released Monday (Sept. 10th), I just wanted to share some background on what goes into creating something like this.

The poem itself was written over a period of a few months and finished back in March. After a couple more months of working on the music with Kimberly StarKey a.k.a. The Rogue Pianist, then recording and mixing, we were finally ready to start planning the video. I wanted to shoot in late June or early July, but we both had a big performance in Seattle the first week of July with Jennifer Thomas, and we had some further scheduling difficulties finding a date where all the key members of the film crew would be available. We finally decided on August 4th and I began working with the team on pre-production.

The first task was to find a location. I wanted to set up a street performance scene with the two of us, but it’s not easy to just drop a piano on a city street and start filming. Los Angeles is extremely strict about filming anywhere without a permit and cops will show up out of nowhere within minutes at the mere sight of a camera. Combined with the unpredictability of a public street even if we did obtain a permit, the only option was to find a film studio with a backlot set that looked like a city street. As you can probably imagine these don’t come cheap. We went with the lowest cost one, which was still pretty expensive for an indie project.

With a location secured we were able to start masterminding the shoot. Having a controlled “movie set” type location opened up some freedoms as far as what we could do, which was pretty much anything that didn’t leave a mark. Since the song is called “I Am Not Shaken”, I thought it would be fitting to have some chaos happening around us as we’re performing, but we just go on doing our thing – not shaken, like the string quartet in the movie “Titanic” when the ship is sinking. That’s actually the reference I used to describe what I had in mind to the rest of the team.

Ryan (director), Becky/Chris (producers), CJ (production designer) and I began brainstorming on how to pull this off. I don’t want to give away too much, but we’d need smoke, ash falling through the air, pieces of broken buildings, and a way to simulate fire. We’d need good makeup. We’d need quite a few extras. We’d need to shoot at night to avoid 100+ degree August daytime temperatures in LA, and also because things just look cooler at night. But illuminating a street set at night requires a lot of powerful lights and a lot of people to set up said lights, which also doesn’t come cheap and probably ended up doubling the budget.

I reserved a uHaul which I would later fill with my trusty stunt piano, a PA system, and some 10-15 large bins of broken asphalt, wood scraps, crumbled building materials, and dirt clods that I gathered from the shoulders of roads and bowels of abandoned fields on the outskirts of town. I began recruiting friends that might be interested in coming out to be in the video, and storyboarding the scenes they would be in.

Kimberly arrived from Oregon the day before the shoot. We had a final production meeting with Ryan and went through some movie references for inspiration and color/look considerations. The next morning we rehearsed the song a few times at my house before disassembling the piano and loading it.

Unloading on location was around 4:00 pm, which meant it was still pretty hot. I worked up a sweat reassembling the piano while CJ and her crew began dressing the set with all the apocalyptic fixings. As the sun began to wane, the next few hours were spent setting up lights, cameras, camera rigs, fires, and of course, the snack table. We would have one night to make a disaster movie. And it wouldn’t get dark enough to start shooting until 8:30 pm.

I wouldn’t be actually performing and filming my scenes until the end of the shoot, but in the meantime there was plenty to do – greeting cast members, getting into wardrobe/makeup, setting up the sound system, surveying the set, communicating with Ryan and John (DP/Cinematography) about how we’re shooting things, and trying to monitor the footage as we go.

To abide by California filming law, we had to finish shooting any scenes with minors by 12:30 am so we did those first, then knocked out a few more scenes with remaining cast after that. Finally, somewhere around 2:00 am it was time to set up and shoot the main performance scene with Kimberly and I.

Through some combination of Dr. Pepper, adrenaline, and pure love for what we do, we managed to pull it off and finished filming around 3:30 am. But as you’ll gather from seeing the video, we made quite a mess, and it would be a few more hours before we could head home.

The final dustpans of shrapnel and wet ash were dumped into the trash by the light of sunrise, and “I Am Not Shaken” was a wrap. When I finally got to get some sleep the next night I had been awake for 40 hours. The amazingly hard-working members of the film team mentioned above didn’t get much sleep that weekend either and I’m so grateful for their dedication and talents.

Although not initially planned to be so, after all was said and done this was the most expensive video I’ve produced to date. I know there’s no way I’ll ever make the money back and I certainly can’t sustain this kind of budget to make videos. But I’m trying to do good. To testify of truth. To be a voice that someone might need to hear. There’s no material thing that I could spend money on that is worth more to me than that.

If you’d ever like to be a part of making these videos and get some more behind the scenes access and other perks such as being in videos (one of my patrons got to hang out on set and be in a scene), inside info & live chats/Q&A/concerts, check out my Patreon page at patreon.com/journalpoems.

To see the finished video, please subscribe HERE and click the little bell next to the Subscribe button to be notified as soon as it’s live September 10th.

And finally, if you’ve read this far… bless you and thank you for your support.  🙏

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EPILOGUE After googling the Titanic scene with the string players I just realized that the last song they played was “Nearer My God to Thee” which is one of my favorite hymns… this whole thing just came full circle for me. The whole process of writing, recording, and bringing I Am Not Shaken to life through video has definitely made me feel nearer to God. I hope some will feel the same after watching it.