
I love this song to bits! I'm a huge fan of Eminem and when Cindy suggested that we team up to do Eminem feat. Rihanna - Love The Way You Lie, I was more than intrigued. The first time I watched the video, it provoked a very strong emotional response. It's just one of those music videos you wish you directed. Pure ingenuity distilled into a 5 minute AV clip.
I'm very proud of the final production but let me just ramble on about how this materialized. I have watched this video countless of times and gotten the gist of the story behind it. It's has a theme that most of us can relate to and the powerful message behind it acts as a warning against how relationships can go really bad and raises awareness of domestic violence.

The all star cast features Eminem and Rihanna singing with inter cuts to scenes of Megan Fox and Dominic Monaghan (best known as Charlie from Lost) - a chronological mashup of how they met and their current situations and attempts to salvage it. Megan Fox donated all her earnings to SOJOURN - a charity for battered women and their children. It is ultimately about empowering women.
Anyway, back to our filming, I realized that we hit a snag coz my sunburn from Krabi was starting to peel really bad at the time. It had to be peeled off before we can start filming so I started with the storyboards.

The camera angles are replicated almost exactly as in the video and although there were some scenes that we cannot do e.g. setting myself on fire (it requires heptane to be even remotely safe) and the bar fight (don't have a breakable bottle prop) we managed to somehow do the video and still remain true to the original.
There are multiple shots from multiple angles and it took 5 hours of shooting to complete the video. I tried to edit the video myself but Windows Live Movie Maker does not have the capacity to do this so I engaged Haze Long to help me with it. She's really good considering there are over 100 video files and managed to capture the essence of what we wanted.
The spitting scene in particular was rather hard to do - it appears that normal saliva does not propel in an arc that we wanted so Cindy used water inside her mouth to do it instead. She has the exact same outfit as Megan was wearing in the video and had to dry it with a hairdryer several times due to the number of takes we had to do.

Special thanks to Fresh for being our videographer!
I present to you - our finished production:
It was a lot of fun to do this project and see it come to life. I am very proud of the final cut and even though it was a lot of work as well, the satisfaction of doing a video that came out as good as this is nothing short of nirvana.
Here are some outtakes from the video:
This is how we know spitting doesn't look good on video.
I had to blow out Cindy's candle while not appearing in the frame and what made this really funny was Fresh's deadpan comment at the end. Heh! We both laughed so hard.
The reason we did this video is to participate in the Arthur's Day Man of Action contest. This involves you getting creative (like our video - we did the parts in between so it sounds like Eminem and Rihanna is singing about us) and filming a music video involving your favorite artist or band.
Just post the video on YouTube and the video link at the Guinness Malaysia Facebook page with your name and video title (it must start with Arthur's Day 2010:) and you'll get a chance to win a trip to Dublin to visit the famous St James Gate Brewery and have a pint of the black stuff - it's as fresh as it gets, any closer to the source, you'll be drowning in the vat. ;)
Oh, and each and every qualified entry will automatically win two passes to Arthur's Day (which requires no further introduction)! Everyone knows about the legendary Arthur's Day and you don't want to miss it - I went to the last one and enjoyed it thoroughly. Arthur's Day to me is an outdoor concert with great music and smooth pints of Guinness. It's the ambience that pulls me rather than the lineup! You can purchase your tickets at the site.
There's also a Man of Vision contest going on where you play Robert Langdon and decipher clues in an image at the same site!
Anecdote: The original video has Dominic's hand with "Cindy" and a 555 number. We used "Megan" for this video as a tribute to this coincidence.
Watch it in full screen for the best experience! You want to go to Ireland? The winners will be announced 21st September. You'll have to top this video to do it, else watch out for blog updates involving titles like "Top of the morning" when we win the contest. ;)








































































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