Did we ever think it would get this big? Not necessarily, but we knew it had the potential to mean something great.
My City began as a song featuring established and emerging artists from Fort Wayne and the Northeast Indiana region and has become a movement in the process. A Better Fort, the originators of what’s come to be called #HipHhop4theCity, was on a mission to not only retain young adults in the area, but give them purpose and connection to their home town.
Enter Lynchpin. With the idea to create a music video spawned in late summer, pre-production began in the fall with filming planned for December to coincide with the song’s release. We knew that if the song was going to showcase area artists, we wanted to place them in iconic and important locations around Fort Wayne.
We also knew we wanted to keep it raw and organic and not overproduced, as if we had just appeared in the middle of the movement on the street. With the client’s limited budget, our biggest expense was the rental of six Zeiss prime lenses for three DSLR cameras we employed. Despite the cold weather and rain, we got everything we wanted to, save for a slightly different opening due to the availability of the artists. Use of the Steadicam helped speed our set ups, but took some time to plan.
In the spirit of the project, we also hired film students from nearby Huntington University and were fortunate to be welcomed into our locations at Coney Island, Parkview Field, and others. Some have asked what drove our decisions to chose certain locations and really it boiled down to story. Being able to feature the run down Rialto Theater with Parkview Field was our way of visually linking chapters from Fort Wayne’s story and introducing them to a demographic that may not always make that connection. Plus, our city deserves to be lensed.
My City has since become something bigger than the sum of its parts and was averaging 500 views an hour on YouTube after it premiered.
What has been really satisfying is hearing comments from citizens about locations close to them, like Hyde Brothers Bookstore. To hear folks speak with pride about seeing their street corner in this project makes them feel like their neighborhood or city is something special.
That’s something we’ve always known.