"My Ship" - Nadia Ackerman | Music Video

Nadia Ackerman's song "My Ship" was inspired by a young boy looking out to sea, when asked by his mother "What are looking for?" the young boy commented "I'm waiting for my ship to come in."

We shot this video one rainy afternoon while on tour in Australia. It's amazing how many things lined up perfectly for this video happen.

Here let me list them for you... ready.
1. The weather.
It was June, Australia's winter and usually it's rainy season. But this particular June was one to go on record as one of the highest rainfalls ever! It was drizzling during our shoot, the rain had slowed down just enough to make it tolerable for the boys to stand outside. You'll also notice that the sea was placid barely a ripple in the water. A calmness that gave a sombre feeling to the video. Perfect visually for creating that infinity horizon especially with the bit of fog to help mask the industrial cargo ships not far off shore. By the way Harvey Jones, the synthensizer mastermind in Nadia's band, and I went on a bike ride down to the same area the next day. The sea was raging! 4 foot swells and gail force winds. You would not have believed it was the same beach.

2. The costumes.
Nadia was the artistic director of this video and wanted the boys to wear pirates costumes. We were in Melbourne for only a few days. Doing radio interviews and a gig at The Toff our time was precious. Fortunately the pirate threads arrived on our second to last day.

3. The actors.
Jack and Sam were amazing! You just never know with kids. With Nadia's direction they adhered to her every command. They did manage to give the camera a "rude" finger or two during the playful running around scenes. We all got a good chuckle.

Jack and Sam are brothers very close. Jack, the older brother, has aspergers and the expressions he gave are so genuine we were besides ourselves. While Sam the younger one, who may be the next dance sensation, was an excellent supporting role.

4. The edit.
Due to the weather and the boys attention span we managed to shoot for barely 35mins. Not nearly enough film I thought at the time. I did my best to get as much cut away footage as I could. We got a couple of takes out of the boys for each scene. Nadia who loves to edit did an amazing job piecing the story together. I really wish we had had better weather conditions to get more B footage. Seriously I thought by the time we were done shooting my Nikon P7000 was going to short circuit it was so wet. Regardless Nadia managed to edit what we had to a solid music video.

In hind sight I really would not change a thing about the shoot for this music video. I've learned over the years you can plan and plan and plan a shoot. I was traveling with limited gear for the tour and no assistant. However sometimes you just have to go for it. As I state in my quote at the bottom of my website "Imagine NO excuses... All that is left is the space to create."

More info about
Nadia Ackerman
Harvey Jones