Harlano Weekes was the artist, his music soul funk. He’d put out an ad in shootingpeople and my dad Nic applied for the position, mainly so as to give me some further experience directing and editing. As it turned out, I’d be getting some serious experience grading, too.

You never really expect to get these jobs, sending in cold, but Harlano liked our films and got in touch. When Harlano asked my dad if he could produce his music video – shooting his band in a record store – in a record store, for around £500 all in. We were tempted to say: “Yeah, sure, you mean on an iPhone, no lights, right?” Instead, we said we’d take a shot and see what we could do.

The toughest tasks were finding a cinematographer who had his own kit, or access to kit, at £150-200 p.d.. There were several possible contenders, but they couldn’t get the price below £400, either because they had to hire in or needed help with transport, or both.

Finally we found Stef Lee, a big black guy with dreads and a warm smile and handshake. He owned a Sony FS700, a camera good enough for the job, he also had some lights.

Harlano had found a music store out in Hackney Wick called Vinyl Pimp. It was spacious enough and already set-dressed to a large degree, with sacks of vinyl everywhere.

My dad and Stef worked together, while I worked with Stef’s assistant, Harry J Balding, who turned up with his Canon 7D.

There really wasn’t the kit or the time to get too clever with what we had, but we added a couple of nice touches with the record player and the reportage style shots at the end of the song, by which time the half of the band had to rush off to day jobs!

What impressed us most was how much fun the band had performing together. They were easy to work with and a pleasure to be around.

A couple of days later I had a rough cut ready to show my dad. We fine-tuned together till we thought it was about as good as we could make it given the coverage, and then I set about doing the grade on DaVinci.

Boy was that a ball-ache! The Redheads Stef had used had worked pretty well for the dark skin, but completely blown up the back wall, which was white. So I had to go through frame by frame matting the overexposed white – a task that took me five days in total! I can say that I’m now pretty good at matting, even if a little unhinged by the experience!

Harlano gave us a few notes on the cut, asked us to provide a cut-down version, and then we were done.

It’s simple enough, admittedly, but the song’s quite catchy and the band come across really well as likeable people – which they most certainly are!