The North Carolina-based country music artist Paige King Johnson needed a video for her song “Why God Made Small Towns.” She didn’t have a lot of money to spend on the video, but having worked with Martin Buchanan and Oh Shoot Productions on a previous project or two, she reached out to see if I could help her out.

Paige originally pitched the idea that she really only needed what they call in the industry a “visualizer” video. A visualizer is a video that doesn’t feature the artist performing the song, but rather just adds pretty images together to bring it to life. The song, which she co-wrote with Mike Astrachan, captures the earthiness and virtuosity of life in small town America and she wanted to use her own hometown of Angier, North Carolina as the backdrop.

Having worked with her on another video for “Homes In The Hometowns,” I knew how good Paige is on camera, and especially how well she lip syncs to her own compositions. If you’ve ever watched a lot of music videos, you might have noticed that the singer often doesn’t appear to actually be singing the song. There’s something about just forming the words with your lips that leaves out the breathing portion of singing, and often a singer in a video doesn’t look believable. Paige understands that completely. She is a pro at singing the lyrics exactly like she recorded them, all the way down to the enunciation of every syllable. It makes the job of editing the video so much easier, plus it comes across perfectly.

Knowing this about Paige, I decided that there was no reason to not produce a full music video, complete with the artist singing the song, instead of a visualizer. We had a budget to get me one day of filming in Angier and to get it edited. Paige acted as the producer on the ground prior to the shoot day, lining up the resources in advance. We filmed at a day care center, the fire department, her old high school and The Red Barn Restaurant, all with permission from her townsfolk.

To capture her singing performance, we shot in the stands of the high school football field, in the Angier town square and, in a real stretch for a one-camera, no assistant shoot, from truck to truck while Paige drove and sang the lyrics. To pull off that feat, Paige had her husband Griffen drive his pickup truck up and down the side streets of Angier. Paige, piloting her granddad’s old 1997 Ford truck, kept perfect pace with her husband’s vehicle. I was kneeling in the flatbed of the lead truck working a gimbal. Thankfully, Griffen provided a couple of blankets to pad my boney knees. The music track was playing from my iPhone, near enough to me so that the camera could record the song and still loud enough for Paige to hear and sing along to. Very low-budget, but effective.

I shot everything on a Sony FX3, which does low light beautifully, and also allows for 4K video at 60fps for the options that presents to the editor.

I think the video captures the essence of the composition, depicting life in a small town, capturing both the languid, nostalgic mood of the song as well as the familiar rhythms of the day. Let me know if you agree.