About a month ago, Sheila English asked if I would be interested in directing Christine Feehan’s upcoming book trailer for Turbulent Sea.
Without hesitation, I responded I would love to do it. Then she drop the really big news: it would be a music video! I immediately understood what she wanted. Turbulent Sea is based on Joley’s life as a famous singer. Sheila wrote the song and when I heard it I was hooked.
My experience in producing and working on music videos matched perfectly with this request. I had worked on several of Gloria Estefan’s music videos including “Turn the Beat Around”, “I’m Not Giving You Up” and “Reach.” I thought about Gloria’s performance in the first two and knew that this was the look and feel we would go for.
As it turned out Gloria is one of Christine’s favorite music artist and agreed that this was the feel that she wanted for the video. Cecilia, her daughter, would play Joley and I requested that she look at several of Gloria’s videos in particular, I’m Not Giving You Up” which I coordinated (Bille Woodruff directing and Jeff Nelson producing).
I was looking for a lot of emotion which can be very hard to capture in music videos. Most of the time the music artist is “selling” to the camera too much or trying to hard, but Gloria, the pro, knows exactly how to bring it. I was a little concerned about Cecilia, because it takes years to perfect the skill of lip syncing and acting. But, Cecilia handled like she had been doing it all her life! She really just came right to it and from the first take I knew we had a natural performer in her.
The song has an emotional climax to it and Cecilia looks right into the camera and lets us see right into her soul. I was shaken when she gave the performance outside the stadium door (she takes the wig off and throws it down.)
She also was a real blast to work with. We had fun doing the explosion scene at the end and were joking and laughing around a lot right before we filmed it. I was concerned that she wasn’t going to be in the right state for the scene, but as soon as we rolled camera she dropped the goofy kid act and went right to work, jumping high in the air and throwing herself down on the mat with all her energy. She is one athletic little lady!
Of course, I would be remiss not to mention Eric Holter who played Ilya, but I’m going to blog about that another time. Cheers – Victoria Arias Fraasa
