So it’s Saturday night in the sleepy Thousand Oaks town. The Devlin/Mannle clan are sitting together in the living room…

 Dev: “hey, is Vasquez Rocks near here?”

Paul: “Yea, it’s only about an hour away”

Dev: “Wow, can we go there?”

Paul: “Sure, that would be fun, let’s go tomorrow”

Later on…Paul to Heather: “…Vasquez Rocks… that would be so cool to film a video for Kayte’s new song, ‘Fallin’”

Heather (with a groan): “Can’t we just go someplace and enjoy it for what it is and not turn it into a major production?...oh, o.k. I know it will be fun and probably great in the end.”

Paul: “But how cool and Devlin could film it”

The family gets together and plans out the day. The song was not even recorded yet. There was a rough guitar part and a rough lead vocal but nowhere near completed. Before we headed out Paul and I recorded a close to final vocal so that the final music track could link to the video. Time was running out but after we recorded that vocal and did a very rough mix, Paul & Heather loaded the gear and we were on our way.

A quick stop to get sandwiches at Lassens, the local Health Food Store, and we were eating in the car and discussing how we were going to make this all happen.

It was so amazing to see Vasquez Rocks en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasquez_Rocks and Dev was so happy. The very first thing we did was take photos of Dev all around the rocks with his “Vulcan Salute” then we got to work…

The afternoon sun was perfect and Dev went ahead to scout out the locations. We knew we wouldn’t have much time before the sun set so we just had to go as fast as we could.

We started low on the rocks and as the sun was setting, we kept moving higher up the rocks to stay in the sun. As we went up higher though, the color of the setting sun kept getting warmer and the color of the rocks were just amazing.

Heather: …”you should stand right here in front of these rocks and film your shadows from the setting sun…” – That was so very cool. Heather has an amazing eye and filmed with the other video camera in addition to taking some amazing photos. Not to mention being the key grip. Heather also suggested we lay flat on the big rocks with the sun setting on us.

Dev had set his phone to alert him when we had to finish filming before the sun completely set. Every once in a while you would hear him say, “…only 30 minutes left…only 20 minutes left…”. That was so cool he did that because he kept us all on task.

As we were filming on the rocks, a man and his child got stuck up on the rocks. The rescue team had to be called in to get him off the rock. So as we were filming, there was this huge helicopter flying right over us. They assessed the situation and realized they weren’t needed for the rescue but before they left, they did a very low fly-over on us…I think they were checking us out…it was so loud though and windy from that chopper and we felt so small.

The last shot of the day: Paul and I are doing our very last take and what flies behind us but a Hawk. It not only flies behind us on the very last few seconds of the song but circles back around as it leaves…amazing!! We think it was Dad making an appearance for us…really beautiful. What are the chances?

So we actually only filmed for probably an hour or so but got amazing footage. Devlin’s mastery of the camera was impressive. When Paul was editing the footage he kept commenting to me on how incredible Devlin’s talent is. Devlin shot completely in manual mode and made some really beautiful moves at some incredible angles.  He anticipated where the music was going and changed his focus accordingly. Paul says it made his job of editing so much easier because of the emotion that Dev captured through his camera work. This was all based on a song that he hadn’t really heard until the night before. When you watch the video you can see his talent with the camera and his eye for shots that needed to taken, i.e., me walking down the rocks, Paul and I walking and talking.

All the while, there was laughter and we had fun.