Behind The Scenes: Coastwise - Gimme What You´ve Got (Official Video)

Everyone knows that adversity can be a driver of creativity. But, sometimes, adversity is just a bitch. The fact that this video clip turned out all right is a marvel on its own.

As with all our music videos, the video clip for Gimme What You've Got was produced, recorded, and edited entirely by the band. When we were thinking about which singles to release from our debut album "Hard Rock Is Back", we decided to record as many video clips as possible for as many songs as we could. Since we do everything on our own, chances are high that a video clip would flop during production, so we wanted to account for that by planning more recordings than we needed. We would choose the singles based on whatever videos turned out the best. In the end, we picked four songs to record a video clip. By the time we got to this one, we had already recorded two of them.

We had negotiated a deal to use a famous rock bar in Lisbon as the venue for this recording, as well as hired two actors to play the main roles, just as it can be seen in the final product. However, the day before the recording, everything started to fall apart: the venue decided to quadruple the price they had originally asked for, forcing us to either be blackmailed or drop them. Of course, we chose the latter. Furthermore, the female lead went completely AWOL, not picking up any calls and refusing to answer messages. We were down a venue and half of the cast.

With less than half a day until filming started, we had to scramble to find a new place and actress. After a thousand calls, we managed to secure a beautiful themed venue called Hail Rock Club. For the actress, we just marched around the centre of Lisbon asking every hostess and bartender we found if they would be willing to join our production. We ended up finding our actress in Dávila, who agreed to do this job on such short notice. Arthur, the singer, and director for this particular video clip, went on to rework the script overnight to adapt it to the venue and new actress.

When the time came, we were happy with what we had. The bar fit everything perfectly. The chemistry between Dávila and Igor, her male counterpart, was excellent right from the start. The filming of the video clip went well, and we had everything we needed for Breno, our drummer and production wizard, to work with. Except that all the images were too dark and full of static. We knew that, when recording with a phone, no matter its quality, this could happen. Poor lighting is the worst enemy of digital recordings. We took all the precautions we could, but the end result was still horrible.

By this time, one of the other video clips we recorded prior to this one had not worked out, and we were unable to record the 4th one. So if this one flopped we would only have one music video and single. We had no other option than to make this work somehow. So Breno had to spend over a month working on the images and trying to find a way to overcome this lighting problem in post-production. About two weeks before the single was released, he found a solution. And we have to say, despite all these challenges, we are very happy with the end result.