This is the official video for the charity single Haiti Child. Written soon after the disaster in Haiti by Elaine Doonan, the inspiration for the song came from a story Elaine had heard about a 22 day old child, found alive beneath the rubble 7 days after the earthquake.

There’s a great vitality to the song that hit me when I was filming the live version weeks before. I looked to capture that during this studio shoot by keeping the camera fluid and also in the edit by cutting during key notes and moments.

I shot the video during the one day recording session in Dublin (while tip-toeing around the wooden-floored recording rooms in my socks) using the Canon 7D SLR and a basic Canon 50mm, 1.8 EF lens. The song’s production had a tight time frame and the video even more so which meant I didn’t have time or space even on the day to set up some subtle lights or rigging for tracking. However I am very pleased with how The Canon 7D handled the condition.

I wasn’t shooting in so much as ‘low light’ as I was in ‘no light’! The musicians preferred to work in near darkness (except for Davey on the mandolin, who not only had all the lights on but also had a 3-bar heater on full belt, in case his tan faded or something), which meant that despite the 1.8 lens I was on 1/30 sec and had to blast the ISO up to 4,000, though the noise level was very acceptable, for video anyway.