Mark Shine “I’m a Butterfly”
Vintage Music Video, 2005
- Role
- Director & animator
- Relationship
- Continuing collaboration begun with the 2002 Dance Pon Di Corner cover
- Target
- A music video about the pure joy and discovery of a child — carried by a child, on a one-day schedule
- Constraints
- 2005 · four-hour shoot · the lead performer is the artist's own young daughter, and children do not take direction on a clock
- Force fielded
- Nick Charney Kaye — direction and animation; M Lowe and Richard Green — writers; Mark Shine's daughter — lead
- Time-to-dispatch
- Shot in a single four-hour session and delivered 2005, for the album Urban Rocsta
- Result
- A delivered music video for Mark Shine, from the album Urban Rocsta, courtesy of UpFlite Music — watch it on Vimeo
- Principal
- Mark Shine — courtesy of UpFlite Music
This is a music video about the pure joy and discovery of a child. Mark’s daughter stars in this video, and although working with kids can be unpredictable, by the end of the four-hour shoot I had a smile frozen on my face.
Written by: M Lowe and Richard Green.
Lead: the artist's daughter. Age: young enough that the schedule is hers.
Shoot: four hours, one day.
Direction method: follow, don't stage. The performance is discovery, and discovery cannot be blocked.
Post: animation over live action — the butterfly the song promises.
Directed & animated by: Nick Charney Kaye.
Shooting a four-hour window
Every craft decision on this video follows from one production fact: a child gives you a few good hours and no more, and none of them arrive on cue. So the coverage plan inverts — instead of setting a frame and asking the performer to enter it, you follow the performer and let the frame catch up, then buy back the composed images in post, where animation can put a butterfly exactly where the edit needs one.
That is also why it works emotionally. Joy is the single hardest thing to direct and the easiest thing to record, and the difference between the two is whether the camera is willing to wait. This one waited, for four hours, and came away with a smile on both sides of the lens.
The relationship behind it started three years earlier on a sidewalk: the Dance Pon Di Corner cover, the first Mark Shine commission, and the beginning of a circle of collaborators that also produced Melodic Yoza’s “Ride On” in 2008.
We value direct experience — in life, in design, and in play, says the manifesto. A four-hour shoot with a kid is direct experience with no negotiating position: you cannot out-think a child’s attention span, you can only meet it. Presence over avoidance, on a call sheet.
Directed & animated by Nick Charney Kaye. Written by M Lowe and Richard Green. From the album “Urban Rocsta,” courtesy of UpFlite Music.
Proof: watch it on Vimeo.
