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Put some flowers in your hair ... 

Monday, 7 July 2008

... before you go on reading! :) We hope that it's not that stormy at your place like it was on our first day of shooting. Our flowers had no chance ...

As for the shootigs you have to know that we have never been to San Francisco before. We only had our guitars, our mp3 players with the song and our cameras. But we also had luck. Our friend Joel whom we got to know on our last vacation in California (2007) has moved to San Francisco in the meantime.

And he made it his business to 1st show us the best places and 2nd to be our "grip", means to carry our guitar cases while we were filming. Additionally we enjoyed his all-American humor that was reflected in the choice of his T-shirt for that day.

In the hope that we could get a great view on the city from the Eastern hills of San Francisco Bay, we hit the road early at sunrise. But unfortunately the city together with it's famous bridge was all curtained by fog and dust from the hundreds of bush fires in the area. We could only vaguely guess where the Golden Gate Bridge was located.
 

Nevertheless we filmed the first take there, where we are sitting on some tree trunks, the city in the back, the mp3 players with the original song in our ears to which we sang playback. After all our studio-version should be in-sync with the video in the end.

The next thing in our sights: The possibly most famous and most visited Street of San Francisco - Lombard Street. It wasn't easy to shoot pics and videos there without parmanently having tourists in front of the lense. But in return there were the most and the most beautiful flowers of everywhere.
 

And soon you could see us standing and hear us singing amidst the greens, plucking our guitars. In Austria you could never do that without having a full crowd of people, giving their surprised or indignandt comments or even having a police man who would immediately banish you from the grounds. Accordingly we were quite shy and unsure on the first shooting day of our lives, but that died away soon.

In America many things are different. Either people find it normal, means they don't care about it, or people find it exciting that somebody is doing such things. Then they stop, sing along with, take pictures and applaude afterwards. We experienced both and were grateful for it.

In the beginning it was difficult to make a sensible face. It was a little embarassing though, but we took it this way: The more people would take notice, the better, the most fancy was the idea. And then - nobody knew us there, and in the end it was a lot of fun. After a while we lost our shyness to do exceptional things and in our case that's a must sometimes ;)

Red cancer on the wheel - the landmark of San Francisco harbor

Right after Lombard Street we went down to Fisherman's Wharf on Pier 39. It is mainly famous for it's overdimensional steering wheel, the landmark of San Francisco harbor. Of course we did some shooting there too, and some of the takes became quite unusual. For the video we just put everything suitable together. 

Was there anything else missing? Oh, yes - the famouy cable cars.  You could compare these cars with the Austrian tramway. The big difference is the drive. Cable cars move on rails. But IN these rails there run cables. If the cars want to move they clip on these cables and go along with them. (Okay, the cars themselves don't want to drive, but the passengers ^^)
 

Shooting in front of Golden Gate Bridge: Braving the forces of nature!

Last but not least we still wanted to catch sight of the Golden Gate Bridge, so we had to move closer. Everyone knows it, everyone loves it ... the rust-colored bridge over the San Francisco Bay. It is a very strange feeling to stand in front of something you only heard of. In school we had all the sights of San Francisco. And now we were there!! Nice feeling, highly recommended =)

The shooting in front of the bridge was a chellenge for itself! We went on top of a hill on the northern bank, so that we would have the bridge right in the background. Very beautiful but with a serious handicap: It was icy up there! Un-be-lievable! Basically it was just extremely windy (extremely!). Totally different than down in the city. We had just our thin dresses, and the flowers in the hair were for the birds. But as we wanted to have good shots in front of the bridge we had to go outside!

We prepared everything in the windless dugouts which were located a bit aside from the viewing platform, and then we ran outside quickly. Most of the takes we couldn't use afterwards because of the clearly visible chattering of our teeth. The sunset scene we filmed some hours later, about 8 pm, and it didn't get warmer till then :) We just wonder how our Dad managed to keep a calm hand while filming. So the moral of the story: For those who come to San Francisco - be sure to wear a thick jacket :) !

Oddly enough we survived all that and after a short ride through the vespertine city, where a bistro named MonaLisa passed our car as well, our video finally was in the box. Another big Thank you to Joel for his companionship and especially his persistance since this was no tranquil tourist-sightseeing but a hard and physical day of work. So let's join him when he says "Let's go jammin'!"

Cheerio,

Mona and Lisa 
 

And here are the other two making-of's and videos:

> California Dreamin'
> Hotel California

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