CMT Blog: Archive

While preparing to shoot a video for "Broken," Tift Merritt didn't even come up with a treatment. "We just decided we wanted to make a day in the life of a bohemian - or a day in the life of me," she says. "And at the same time, we wanted to make a little, tiny French film, like a three-minute French movie. I'm obsessed with French movies, so I obviously thought this was the greatest thing ever."

She also skipped the typical hair/makeup/wardrobe luxuries of a video shoot, and the crew relied entirely on natural light.

"I'm starting to have some experience of being on sets and photo shoots and I just discovered the way that I like to do things is naturally," she says. "The lights, the makeup and everything like that - it eats a lot of time. There are people who do it so beautifully and there is absolutely a place for it, but for this we used everything naturally. It was like old Cartier-Bresson photographs or Robert Frank photographs, where you're really portraying life as it is, because that's good enough. You don't have to dress it up to make it beautiful."