For the first time in, well, maybe ever, Big Communications has a serious dog in the fight at the CMT Music Awards.
Updated June 9, 9:15am: “Die A Happy Man” won Male Video of the Year! It did not win Video of the Year, though, but those YouTube hits keep climbing.
Chances are you’ve heard Thomas Rhett’s massive hit “Die A Happy Man” by now, seeing as it’s up to 58 million YouTube views, gone platinum, spent six straight weeks atop the Billboard Country Airplay chart (the first song to do so since 2008), and brought home major awards left and right*.
On June 8, Rhett’s video will be up for yet another pair of enormous awards from CMT: Video of the Year and Male Video of the Year.
And perhaps nobody in Alabama will be cheering harder for Rhett than our very own Dan Atchison, who produced the video.
Atchison, who has produced roughly 40 music videos in his day, has worked with artists like Little Big Town, Montgomery Gentry, and even Rhett himself before. But this shoot was a bit more special.
For starters, shooting in Hawaii was nice.
“The director, TK McKamy, called me and said, ‘We need to be in Hawaii next week,’” Atchison said. “It was kind of like a vacation for us too. We all stayed in the same house, this big 10-bedroom house right on the beach, right on the north shore, hanging out with Thomas and Lauren during the day.”
The crew was small—only about 12 people—and the location scouting didn’t happen until Dan, the director, and the director of photography landed in Hawaii.
But as Atchison says, “It’s Hawaii, so just turn the camera on.”