Last week, Simple Plan finally revealed the long-awaited music video for their new single ‘Singing In The Rain’, directed by Mark Staubach, which is already very close to hitting half a million views on YouTube. ‘Singing In The Rain’ is the second single from ‘Taking One For The Team’ (as confirmed by Jeff – Opinion Overload was “just” a buzz single, as was ‘Boom’ – see more here) after ‘I Don’t Wanna Go To Bed’.

As you know already, the concept for this music video was inspired by the film ‘That Thing You Do!’ (1996) that starred Tom Hanks, and just like this movie it documents the rise and fall of a band. In Simple Plan’s case, it follows a fictional 1964’s version of Simple Plan (formerly ‘The Simple Plans’ in the video) that starts out as a band playing at talent shows but slowly rises to fame and sells out big arenas [the more observant of you may have noticed that the married members of Simple Plan took off their wedding rings to really get into their ‘teen idol’ characters, who were not supposed to ‘let the world know they’re married,’ as Chuck puts it]. Unfortunately the fame is one of the reasons that creates friction between the band members and eventually causes the band to fall apart.

For some reason, some fans didn’t grasp the concept of the video as a work of fiction and rumors have started going around that the actual band is breaking up. Obviously, that is completely untrue. The guys themselves tried clearing those rumors up on Twitter – Jeff stated: ”It’s just a video. […] We’ve been a band for 17 years: we’re not unbreakable but we are strong and still very good friends.’

Now, thanks to one of the fans who was one of the lucky fans who attended the taping of this music video, I have some interesting scoops from behind the scenes of the ‘Singing In The Rain’ videoshoot:

The shoot that the fans attended was divided into two parts: at first, the participants of the videoshoot arrived at the Danforth Music Hall, a concert venue in Toronto, where the scenes of the band being popular and playing bigger venues were filmed in the morning of February 20th (the shoot started at 8am). The second location was at a veteran building in Etobicoke (Royal Canadian Legion, Branch 101) near Toronto, which lent their interiors for the filming of the ‘talent show’ scenes in the afternoon/evening of the videoshoot. About 50 fans attended the taping at the 1st location and around 75 at the 2nd one.

As it has been announced before, the fans were asked to come dressed in a 60s inspired fashion and were checked before the videoshoot started if their outfits were on point on not. The fans were also asked to change their outfits between the two locations.

A smaller amount of fans also took part in the taping of the scenes, where the band is being chased by fans while they’re on their way to a car. Some of the fans were even given signs (such as ‘Pierre + me’) to hold during this scene. However majority of the shots from this scene didn’t make the final cut of the video.

Eventually the scenes of the two girls fangirling about the 60s version of Simple Plan in their bedroom were filmed. What appears as just a few seconds in the music video actually took almost 2 hours, including the time to set the place up.

Overall, it was an 18 hours long shoot, as the band finally left the location around 2am.

Make sure to visit the SimplePlan.cz gallery for some additional pictures from the making of this music video:

After a week of being able to watch ‘Singing In The Rain’, what are your thoughts on the music video? And which song from ‘Taking One For The Team’ would you like to be the band’s next single/music video?