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Meant for This

“Meant For This” follows singer, Karen Emeny over the course of one year. With only a guitar in hand, she gracefully walks through each of the seasons, while beautiful and dramatic scenery changes all around her. From snow-swept forests, to the brilliant colours of falling autumn leaves, to summer in a street-lit city, the result is a carefully crafted montage of stunning visuals that engages viewers through a variety of twists and turns. A sun-drenched loft is where the video finishes off, as Karen’s bandmates meet up for a fun afternoon rehearsal.

The technical aspects of the video are as varied as the locations themselves. High speed frame rates, 360 degree tracking and stabilized gimbals, practical transitions, and boutique “trick” lenses are combined in post-production, composited and edited to create all different effects experienced in the video.

The reasons for producing a highly dynamic video is multifaceted. Artistically, the evolving nature of the visuals is used as an analogy to support the lyrics by showing a “passing of time” as Karen navigates through life. Practically, the video is meant to combat the diminished attention spans of modern day social media by constantly introducing a fresh look or idea for every part of the song.

Produced by Grammy/Juno winning producer/engineer, Kevin Doyle, and cowritten by Canadian songwriting heavyweight, Emm Gryner, “Meant for This” is a song with heart, and despite all the attempts of distracting viewers with fancy shots and editing, it is Karen’s authenticity that ultimately shines through.

  • Karen Emeny
    Author
  • Emm Gryner
    Author
    David Bowie, Trent Severn, Chris Hadfield
  • Karen Emeny
    Name of Band or Artist
  • Darryl Lahteenmaa
    Director
    Chad Price, Ensemble Vivant, Emm Gryner, Dayna Manning, TD Ottawa Jazz Festival
  • Kevin Doyle
    Producer
    Hall & Oates, Kiss, Alannah Myles, Glen Gould
  • Project Type:
    Music Video
  • Genres:
    Pop
  • Runtime:
    3 minutes 30 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    April 3, 2020
  • Production Budget:
    5,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    Canada
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital 4k
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Darryl Lahteenmaa

Darryl Lahteenmaa is a media producer based in London, Ontario. As a director, shooter, editor, music composer and recording engineer, Darryl has helped create content for many commercial and social media campaigns, television/Netflix programs, music videos, and corporate communications. He has worked with Emm Gryner, Chris Hadfield, Chad Price, Ensemble Vivant, and commercial clients such as TD, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz and Crafty Elk.

Always striving for new and innovative ways to deliver content, Darryl’s work is recognized for having a distinctive creative feel, often combining traditional story driven approaches with the latest production techniques. And with a background in marketing, Darryl tailors the creative of each project to compliment marketing objectives, resulting in suit-for-purpose content that is engaging, dynamic and relevant for today’s evolving audience.

Darryl works as a senior production editor at Brick House Productions and an Audio Post Production professor at Fanshawe College.

Darryllahteenmaa.com
BHcinematic.com
fanshawec.ca

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

I wanted to do this project because I admire what Karen Emeny does. She is a creative and authentic songwriter and that always comes out in her music. I wanted to complement that with a visual component. The idea was to make a video that would be beautiful and fun to watch, something very dynamic that would keep you guessing what would be next. I also wanted to make it look like it wasn’t shot on a single location, so the idea of shooting all the seasons was born.

I also wanted to approach it from a marketing perspective. How could you retain a viewers attention for more than just a few seconds and compete with all the other music videos out there? Was it beautiful locations, camera techniques, attention grabbing editing, etc. Was it a combination of everything? We tried a few ideas before primary shooting started and came up with the formula seen in the video. The concept is simple; Karen walking with her guitar, but it really came to life when we started combining different techniques together. (Such as shooting high speed frame rates plus doing a 360 degree wrap around).

Shooting over the course of a year and trying to dovetail all the shots together came with its own set of technical and logistical challenges. For the 360 shot, tracking Karen’s temporal position in the song and physical position in each shot from season to season proved to be a lot more difficult that I anticipated. Keep in mind, that a lot of these shots are recorded at 250% speed, meaning the lip sync is extremely fast and the camera also has to move very quickly. We were literally running in circles around Karen and shooting at an extremely shallow depth of field (f/1.4). When you put all of these factors together, getting her in the right place at the right time and keeping it in focus, the margin for a successful shot is incredibly small. Hopefully viewers will say, “how did they do that?” or at the least, say, “that’s a cool shot.”

This video was a great opportunity to try a lot of different things, to be a little creative and make something cool. Karen was amazing to work with because she was totally up for any crazy idea. It was a ton of fun to make the video and hopefully it shows!