How was this music video made? Here’s my guess (“Pink Life” by Pink Guy)

Hi! Have you ever looked at a music video and wondered how it was made? Apparently, that’s easy to figure out. A great example of a good music video is “Pink Life” by Pink Guy (also known as Filthy Frank, also known as Joji). Let’s start with a diagram:

You’ll understand later. Here’s the actual music video:

Pink Guy – Pink Life music video (very good).

Watching this video, two words come to my mind: simple and powerful. Pink Guy makes something cool out of something stupid, something powerful out of simple means. This inspire me, and I hope that feeling can be conveyed to you. The “Pink Life” video can, in my opinion, be divided into 7 different scenes/settings:

A lot of different stuff seems to happen in the video, it looks diverse and visually dynamic, but all different shots and scenes are from the same airport runway with its surrounding fields, and have probably been shot during the same day (this is what I meant with simple and powerful). Here’s how the different scenes are scattered throughout the video:

Timeline of scenes in “Pink Life” (left = start of video, right = end of video)

Take this as a surface-level first glance at the editing, because there’s much more to it than just placing clips after each other (like visual effects, zooming, and other things I don’t understand). The editing is a subject on its own and shouldn’t be oversimplified, so treat my diagrams with skepticism instead of respect.

The point is: To get a vibrant and varied music video, you don’t really need to film more than this. Pink Guy did it with only seven visual ideas and a lot of creativity. Getting into the airport, the (seemingly) professional motorbike driver and the drone shots obviously weren’t free, but the budget was probably monumentally lowered because of Pink Guy’s creativity and ability to create much out of little. And that’s the whole point: With little money and a simple mind you can still create professional-looking stuff. And: By analyzing and writing stuff down, you can understand how the masters work. I managed to get a pretty clear image of the creation of the “Pink Life” music video just by writing down what I saw in every second of it, and dividing it into intuitive categories. In ten minutes, “Pink Life” went from a mysterious masterwork to something I almost understood. But remember, this is just technical stuff. To make as good music videos as Pink Guy, you also have to reach the same galactic level of talent as him.

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