how AbaNDa SHAKE produced the video clip "Cat"...

Dear Friends and Fans!

Here's a short story about how AbaNDa SHAKE produced the video "Cat":

The main idea of the song "Cat" (and the clip) is that in every woman there live three different "cats" – three natures: black, red and white. These three different characters are not enemies, they are friends who feel at ease together and are very well dwelling side by side. These "cats" love to play different games and one of them is "dog" chess ("dogs" are men, of course! ;) But! …There is always one very important "dog" in the "cat's" life – one man who is the master of the woman's world!..:)

Natali and Dimitris first thought of the plot - they developed it from the idea of their song "Cat". Natali wrote the scenario and drew the storyboard. It was a very detailed script - a scene per each second. They had had an experience of filming some videos before and they knew that a thorough preparation was very important for a good result.

Within two weeks before the filming Nat and Dim spent three days on photo sessions in a photo studio for making the black-red-white photos for the magazine "Cat Seasons" that was to be used in the process of filming. Natali indeed changed her hair colour for each of the sessions!! Then she designed the cover and the pages, printed them out and glued together in place of the first pages of some real magazine so that it finally looked like the true magazine "Cat Seasons" that actually didn't exist! (In a very curious manner the magazine was gone after the filming - it was lost and nobody has ever seen it since that time...!)

Nat and Dim found and bought all the necessary things of entourage (dog-chess, orange-candle, music-clock, vazes, flowers, stools, a sofa, etc.) and made the decorations. Dim had a plazma-screen imitation made at an artists' shop, Nat modelled and with her own hands sewed the costumes, sewed the "dalmatian" cover for the sofa and sticked "dalmatian" moles onto the piano and laptop, etc. Initially they had planned to rent a white piano from a music salon but right on the eve of the filmimg date the piano had been sold. :)

Nat invented and rehearsed at home her Cat-dancing and choreography on the carpet...Dim trained himself to perform his Dog-dancing and movements too... :)

After that Natali and Dimitris rented a cinema pavilion with the camera, crane and light equipment and hired a group of technicians for the assistance. They spent three working shifts on filming - each day (actually night) they filmed one of Natali's black, red, and white Cat-characters on the blue rear (so that later they could remove the blue colour and combine the three images together on the white background during the postproduction) - and in the breaks they filmed the real cats, the real dog and the Dog-character - Dimitris. :)

The animals behaved awfully - they wouldn't at all do what they had to! :) The cats went crazy and got scared - they didn't want to sit calm when it was necessary and they were very reluctant to move when they were asked! :)) Right on the filming start Nat and Dim faced the fact that in place of the black cat they got a grey!!! one because the black one had fallen ill - so they had to "paint" it in black during the postproduction... And the dog wouldn't want to jump onto the sofa without his master standing close to the sofa in the shot area and teasing him with sausages - so they also had to do a good deal of "correcting" the dog's actions later...

On finishing filming Natali together with three video engineering assistants spent three months of everyday work on postproduction including montage, editing, special effetcs, elements of 2D and 3D graphics. It was a very complicated task to combine three images in one frame - especially when they "touched" each other. But finally AbaNDa SHAKE got what they wanted. It's a great pleasure for musicians (songwriters/ arrangers/ composers) to get the video that totally reflects their vision of the atmosphere and mood of their composition, of what they were trying to convey in their song...

The airplay of the video "Cat" created two very distinctive tendencies in our country's music video production. Firstly, about twenty or thirty videos were shot using the similar colour decision: the white background and three dominant colours on it, mostly red, black and white (in AbaNDa SHAKE's video they were orange, black and white). Secondly, lots of clips became funny, using the "silly" characters in them (though clip making seemed to have been rather "serious" before). And, finally, a lot of ideas and elements were simply "stolen" and reused! :)) Doesn't it all mean we've made a trendy product?! ;)) You can come to conclusions yourselves...

And now enjoy watching and listening! Come back for more!!!