- Music Video Wire

A swirling mass of fecund testosterone is brewing inside the
music video industry. Led by a pack of talented up-and-coming directors, the impetuous creativity of youthful exuberance is again on full display. It’s always interesting to watch, these brazen directors confide in MVwire about their recent concoctions.

The Exit “Let’s Go To Haiti” director Major Lightner

Major Lightner is a New Yorker. And the gritty, unrelenting Let’s go to Haiti is testament to his Big Apple mentality. Major is on first name basis with The Exit. In fact, Major also directed their first music video. The friendliness between the band and the director made things tres facile. Before the shoot, Major and fellow Exits watched that classic Goddard flick Sympathy for the Devil. “We wanted to capture that Vietnam era vibe,” Major remembered. And thus Let’s go to Haiti was conceived. Seven hours later Major gave birth to a rambunctious bundle of joy with gorilla complexion and guerilla complex. The editing took a week. “We took the white channel down to almost zero and blurred the red channel to get the look.”

DOD’s Higher director Morocco Vaughn

Chicago is Morocco Vaughn’s kind of town. With the explosion of Kanye, Twista, and R. Kelley onto the Hip Hop scene, the world is turning to Chicago for a breathe of fresh air. Morocco is Chicago born and bred, and he is ready for the big time. “I know [Chicago] and I hope it’s one of the things that defines me as a director.” Morocco needs only to take a whiff of that mineral air to hear the beat of the urban hymn, to smell the grime of the crime ridden back alleys, and to understand with a knowing nod the awful truth behind the awesome rhymes.

When most rap videos are manufactured snap-fits of obligatory ass shots in fancy cars dribbled with jewelry against a backdrop of excessive real estate, Morocco is alone in his quest to challenge the standard. “I try to throw a little bit of story line in my videos,” Morocco interjected matter of factly. As a matter of fact, his recent video—DOD’s Higher—was of a band that hit it big almost overnight and dropped off the Hip Hop radar just as quickly. “I basically tried to show the loosing and reclaiming of one’s status [in the video].” Kanye dropped in for the shoot and two takes was all it took to capture the rapper for posterity. “It’s my biggest video to date, and I got to admit, I was super nervous. But I got into the groove and we worked well with one another.” The future is bright for Morocco, and knowing when to turn, the windy city might just be the boost he needs.

California “Never” director CJ Roy

A video made for only a couple of hundred bucks, a narrative storyline involving rape, violence, and revenge, and no shooting permit to bout. This sounds like a recipe for disaster. But CJ Roy revels in this kind of apparent chaos. CJ shot California “Never” in West Oakland and West Berkley, a crime infested area a few save the crazy would venture into. “There was one scene involving a spinning car that we shot in a residential intersection…we didn’t have a permit and the cops showed up minutes later,” CJ reminisced fondly. CJ sought refuge in a friend’s house and narrowly escaped the eyes of the law.

The video was shot with digital cameras, a risky move since digital video has very little patience for post-production antics. “We had to get things right during the shoot—the light set up, the composition, everything.” This opportunist attitude has afforded CJ’s work a great quality of spontaneity. CJ is a huge fan of Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze, however he admits that he is not in tune with the music video circle. “I don’t have cable television,” CJ confessed. In fact, he gets his music video feed from the Internet. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe the best way to get inspired is not to find inspiration, but to let it find you.

Scatter the Ashes “Caesura” director Lex Halaby

It is no secret that black and white films still hold a special place in our collective cinematic consciousness. Director Lex Halaby adds his latest moving opus to this venerated tradition. With a dash of experimental fortitude and a set of split screens a la Woodstock (the documentary), “Caesura” emerges from Halaby’s lens stringed together by a narrative thread, and broiled in an undercurrent of suburban alienation.

Daryl, the lead singer of Scatter the Ashes, also happens to be a film school graduate. So, from the start, the director and the band were on equal footing and were talking in a common visual vocabulary. Lex consulted with the band and it was clear that the subject matter needed to be dark. In order to convey this noir-ish atmosphere, Lex took the theme of a dysfunctional family unit and the POV of a teenage daughter. “We drew inspiration from many of Anton Corbijn’s black and white photographs. Brett Juskalian, my DP, brought those images to life during the course of shooting,” Lex said. “The choice to shoot black and white came naturally when discussing the subject matter,” he added.

Lex’s true indie spirit seeps through as he experimented with different types of visual dimensions. But the use of split screen effect might have been the most daring. “Split screen is a funny thing,” Lex explained. “ It is mostly used to show two people in two different locations interacting in some form, like talking on the phone. We decided to do the opposite. We used the split screen to show the same location at the same time, yet displaying two different realities (instead of locations).” Upon closer examination, the right frame almost always seems to depict the nightmarish reality while the left frame shows the Botox version of the same reality. Lex is very grateful for the band’s willingness to put their reputation on the line by doing an experimental video. And we are grateful for the continuation of the spirit of independent filmmaking.

Bad Religion “Los Angeles is Burning” directors Lightborne

“Los Angeles is Burning” is a song about tabloid journalism and how it perpetuates evil in this world by preaching false truth and sensationalizing true lies. Like books, journalism chronicles life with the boring parts dutifully omitted. Burning’s philosophical heaviness weighed down on directors Lightborne. Lightborne wanted to simulate a burning Los Angeles, but at the same time make it unique. Because let’s face it – borrowing a quote from ex-Python Graham Chapman – who hasn’t at one time or another considered setting fire to a public building! Some people work best under pressure, especially if it’s from a major label. And before too long, ideas were spewing all over the canvas. “Two books in particular inspired me,” Lightborne’s Ben Nicholson said, “City of courts by Mike Willrich and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.” On the set, the cityscape backdrop was made out of aluminum and glass, materials that aren’t flammable under high temperature. The moving images in the foreground were cutouts animating at 15 frames per second. The final product was a composite of traditional stop motion and after effects. A burning Los Angeles does not make for pleasant thought, but what a sight!

Stratifying salvation and sin, Kanye West’s music video for “Jesus Walks” blurs religious idioms like good and evil, shedding the archaic veil that separates the secular from the sacred. By pairing obvious religious imagery and symbolism with the profanity of drugs, prostitution, and racism, “Jesus Walks” ultimately imparts the notion that the dichotomy of good and evil is a farce because the wicked and pious alike walk with the divine.

*See the Kayne West “Jesus Walks” music video

Interview With Director Chris Milk

Music Video Wire: Could you explain how the idea for the video evolved?

Chris Milk: I was trying to build the video as a little opera. The song has very distinctive voices floating around it and I was attempting to line those voices up with different characters in the piece. The intent was for every character to be responsible for singing a different part of the song. There is the prison guard at the beginning who yells “Ready, hut!” and later “we eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast.” There is the prisoner who answers, “y’all eat pieces of shit?” The chain gang collectively sings, “Jesus walks with them”. The little jump-roping girls sing the “Jesus Walks” chorus chant. The smallest girl raps the “hell yeah!” part in answer to “we be living in hell here.” The drug smuggler’s stripper girlfriend in the back seat sings the soulful female gospel part. Everyone sings the “Ohhhhhhhhhh ohhhhhhhh” in the last section. And if you want to get really technical, the oboe part is “sung” by the fleeing drug dealers’ car and later by the burning cross as it falls.

MVW: “Jesus Walks” is your second video with Kanye, how is he to work with on set?

CM: Kanye loves film and really wants to understand everything. He’s like a kid in a candy store on set sometimes. He’s always listens carefully to direction and works incredibly hard to make it the best video he possibly can.

MVW: The contrast between Kanye dressed in white and the on coming fire, stunning! What was the process technically?

CM: The flames were shot practically in that hallway set. Fire will only crawl across a ceiling like that so the ceiling section was duplicated onto the walls and floor. Kanye was shot performing in the same tunnel in front of a small green screen with flame bars illuminating him.

MVW: There were several distinct looks of the video, scenes with Kanye, black and white, car chase scene, how did you work with your dp on creating the different “looks”?

CM: Originally I was considering doing it all in black and white but I quickly realized that with all the intertwining storylines it would be very difficult to figure out your geography in the video at any one point. The different color palettes primary function is to let you know which vignette you’re in.

I had an idea for how every section should look except the jump roping little girls. Dave Hussy really figured that one out in the Telecine. I created a set of rules for each vignette for Danny Hiele the DP and myself to work within. Danny is brilliant at taking my set of fixed concrete walls and building a beautiful garden within them. He’s a virtuoso in my book.

The chain gang world is set in a black burned out valley with white uniforms so black and white film was the obvious choice. Danny shot Plus-X negative and then struck a reversal print, which we then transferred from. In the chain gang world the camera most of the time is either on a dolly or a technocrane so the shots are very smooth and composed. The drug smugglers word is super hot and saturated so we shot on reversal. All of the camera moves are very kinetic and hand held. The KKK guy’s world is very desaturated so we flashed our film and printed our negative. Almost all of KKK shots are static lock-offs.

MVW: Seeing the cross on fire rolling down the hill, the Klans man picking it up, catching himself on fire, strong symbolism, what are your thoughts about the scene? Also, near the end of the video there are several images that we see briefly, lightning, overhead shot, painting etc. Do you feel the last few seconds of the video sum up the overall message?

CM: The message of the song, which becomes the subtext of the video, is that Jesus walks with everyone. Sinner, saint, murderer, drug dealer, it doesn’t matter. So my idea was to take these morally reprehensible characters and carefully weave in Jesus/biblical iconography into their stories signifying God is with them. The chain gang prisoner assumes the crucifix position when the guard is harassing him. Then the guard stabs him in his ribs with a baton like the Roman soldier did to Jesus. The drug smugglers’ kilos of coke are transformed into doves, a modern miracle. The little girl jump-roping wears leather and wood sandals. The KKK guy is dragging his burning cross up the mountain, as Jesus did in the precursor to his crucifixion. Kanye is performing in a room which transitions between hellish flames and the angelic halos of fluorescent light tubes on the ceiling. That section dives into the secondary theme of the duality of man. The idea that a person can be simultaneously both good and evil. Or, if you prefer, the more Christlike notion of being both human and divine.

So obviously that’s a lot to get into one video and I knew that much of it would be lost in the nature of its translation. The biggest concern I had (and Kanye as well) was tying a KKK guy into Jesus. That, suffice to say, is a little tricky in a hip-hop video. So far no one has objected though. In fact, some Christian groups have even sung the praises of the video’s ultimately positive message.

I was very careful with that storyline though. The way it is intended to translate is this. It is God conceivably that blows over the KKK guy’s cross causing it to roll down the mountain. The KKK guy’s hate is so all-consuming that he tries to carry the physical manifestation of his hate back up the mountain for all to see. He is so blinded by that hate that he neglects to take into account the burning robe factor and gets himself into trouble. But God forgives him, and causes it to rain thereby extinguishing him. It’s a baptism of sorts, washing away his sins.

So yeah, I doubt anyone got all that but it’s nice to at least make an attempt to build in some layers to it all. The song is really powerful and deep so it sort of necessitates going the extra metaphorical step with everything.

Transposing the dynamic energy of raw urban imagery and sound against a black and white background of inner city life, director Mark Romanek juxtaposed elements of harmony and chaos to produce artist Jay Z’s music video “99 Problems.” Utilizing broken clips of footage captured in Brooklyn’s Marcy housing project, Romanek in conjunction with Jay Z create an effective portrait of urban life. Somewhere between the almost photographic imagery and the rapid montage of cinematic movement, Romanek manages to convey Jay Z’s development and monumentalize the artist’s urban roots as well as the nature of the projects themselves.

Read the treatment and watch the Jay Z “99 Problems” music video at the
Mark Romanek website

Music Video Wire: Obviously the strongest, or at least most immediate, visual element of “99 Problems” is the use of black and white film, did you know from the start that the video had to be shot in black and white?

Mark Romanek: Well, I didn’t get any sort of brief from the label. My dealings were all with Jay-Z directly. We had one phone call before the job was awarded and all he said was that he wanted to shoot something in and around The Marcy Houses in Bedford Stuyvesant where he grew up in Brooklyn. He said, “I want you to make a pissy wall look like art,” I immediately imagined this type of gritty, urban imagery in black & white. So, I asked Jay what he thought of this idea and he said, “I love it. Let’s do it!” That was really the entire “pitching” process. Jay sort of does what he wants.

MVW: How did you like working with Jay Z on this project?

MR: I liked him a lot. Jay is a gentleman — cool, hardworking, and really funny. This was a longer shoot than he was used to and he sometimes complained (in a totally light-hearted way) that I was forcing him walk all over Brooklyn. But, I think he knew we were making something a little special and that since it was his last video, he was willing to put in the extra work. I think he has similar perfectionist tendencies so, he understood my process and the focus I put on trying to get that extra effort out of him and everyone on the crew. Our key word was “fiddling.” If there was a delay, he would say to everyone, “It’s cool. Mark’s just fiddling some more.” I tend to do a lot of…”fiddling.”

MVW: After working directly with Jay Z to develop the concept of the video, what was the labels first response to the treatment?

MR: Well, like I said, the label wasn’t really that involved. The treatment was pretty general. I never really got any sort of response to the treatment from anyone. It was more a kind of formality. Jay was hiring me based on my reel and Rick Rubin’s strong recommendation that I was the guy he should hire.

MVW: What was your experience shooting in the Marcy projects?

MR: Great. It was freezing cold and we were shooting during school hours, so it was pretty quiet. We were able to go in there, shoot what we needed, and split without any big crowds or hassles. It’s a pretty photogenic place. All the people were really cool and were happy to see Jay come back for a visit. A lot of his neighbors are still there and they’re really proud of what he’s accomplished. It was very moving to go back to the apartment where Jay grew up. He’s come a long way and that’s one of the main things the video wanted to portray.

MVW: Being that your subject matter was based on life in the projects, how did you choose individual scenes to achieve the overall concept of the video?

MR: I made a list of ideas and images that aren’t often seen in music videos, things that seemed a bit more visceral or transgressive, and I had several location scouts go out and look for these types of places. I also did a lot of photographic research. I looked at a broad range of urban photo reportage by people I really admire, like Bruce Davidson, Helen Levitt, Weegee, and some of the other “New York School” photographers. Also, I drove around Brooklyn a lot just getting a feel for the Borough.

MVW: There were several shots of people in the video that could be still portraits, powerful images, what are your thoughts on the line between film and photography?

MR: I don’t really think about those sorts of academic distinctions much. I sort of go by my gut as to what’s just a still image put onto motion-picture film, and what constitutes something that is inherently cinematic yet still having the impact of a great still photograph. This gets to the very heart of what makes one image “cinematic” and another image less so. And I’m not sure that can really be articulated. Some images have “teeth” and others are sort of toothless. Some images feel resonant with subtext and others seem one-dimensional and flat. Some feel like they came from some deep place and others just sit there. I guess this is one of the mysteries of cinema.

MVW: The end of the video where Jay Z is gunned down is very dramatic, had you ever directed this type of scene before?

MR: I don’t think so, no. I’m not that huge a fan of gunplay in films. It’s not fundamentally different from shooting any other sort of scene. It just takes a little longer to set up. That scene was done in one take with three cameras. I was tempted to do a second take, but I chose to move on and go to other set-ups. It was really important to me that the video be rich with varied imagery and never repeat itself or rehash set-ups. So, just about every scene was a “shoot-one-take-check-the-gate-and-move-on” type of deal. The “bullet-riddling” scene was really meant to be a kind of abstract, violent, ballet-like moment — a visual climax. It was very intentionally designed to teeter on the brink of the literal but I can see why people might take it as a literal story-point.

Director of Photography, Joaquin Baca Asay’s technological retrograde for the production of “99 Problems” insured that Romanek and Jay Z’s vision would materialize from pre through post production. Naturalistic cinematography combined with the extensive use of filters and minimalist lighting created a gritty texture rich with expression.

MVW: How did you work with Mark on the pre-production of the video?

Joaquin Baca Asay: Mark and I have worked together a few times this year. We just started working together and he kept saying that he wanted to totally freak everybody out. He wanted to shoot things for the content of the video that you’re not supposed to shoot. When we went into official pre-production, he showed me stacks of black and white photographs of the black ghetto world similar to what he wanted to do. There were six or seven books of photography and honestly I can’t remember the names of any of them; he was interested mostly in the accidental quality of the content and just the fact that it was real. He wanted this thing to feel very, very real. A lot of heavy duty scouting had already been done so he was showing me all these crazy locations.

Our approach was to use as little light as possible to make it feel as real as we could. There were some places where we did a lot, like in the club near the end of the video where there are several shots of Jay Z rapping. Even then we used regular household lights to light the scene.

MVW: Were there any concerns shooting the video in black and white?

JA: I’ve shot a lot of black and white film over the years but not that frequently and I was very concerned because Mark is so particular about the way things look. I insisted on doing a test (ended up shooting a pretty scientific film test), which they weren’t budgeted or scheduled for. It wasn’t a lighting test or a look test, it was more like what does this film do and what kind of latitude does it have in terms of exposure. I tested several filters, which in black and white do crazy things with the sky. For example, if you use a red filter it can make the sky look really, really vibrant and it can also make black skin tones pop out. We ended up doing a lot of filtration tests even though we were not expecting to use filters at all. Mark knows a lot technically and he wanted this to be as raw as possible, but when he saw the test, he was disturbed because the lighting didn’t look like anything he wanted. The more we started working with the film, the more he started to figure out that it was just to learn how the film would look and how critical to the look of the whole thing it would be. We ended up using filtration extensively. There are certain scenes you can really see the filter working; there’s a shot of a kid pulling a ski mask off his face and the texture of the ski mask is so intense that if you see it on a good monitor you feel like you can touch it.

MVW: What type of black and white film did you use?

JA: We used Double X Negative, it’s 200 ASA film, but it’s a faster, slightly grainier stock and we wanted some texture in the film. We wanted it to have some grain. But it is also a very, very sharp film, a very beautiful film and it’s different than shooting in color. You get a much different texture from the new color films especially and it was important to Mark that it have a real texture, authenticity of the images. We could have shot color film and transferred it to black and white but then we would have ended up with a much cleaner, smoother look.

MVW: What about lenses?

JA: He really wanted to use one lens to shoot the whole thing because he wanted a constant feeling of movement. The cuts were almost irrelevant and you were always experiencing it from the same subjective vantage point. Everything was shot with an older Zeiss 18mm prime lens because we wanted a lot of flares and for it to look dirty, not perfect and clean. Newer lenses are very beautiful and sharp and it’s very difficult to flare them. We used an Arri 435 to shoot with, a very good slow motion, lightweight, camera because everything was hand held and we shot a lot of slow motion.

MVW: Did you use natural light for most of the scenes?

JA: We did a lot of lighting but it was usually using realistic fixtures. In the “dog fight” scene, we hung one fluorescent fixture over the top of the space that was created in an abandoned warehouse on a pier in Brooklyn. I had other lights hidden around so there would be some depth but I wanted the lights to feel like they would really exist. There’s a scene where there are prostitutes walking in the street and I used a simple light to simulate headlights, just to give some light on the women’s legs. Again it’s from a totally realistic motivation and I don’t even think another DP would necessarily know that I was lighting it. In general, that’s how I like to work. On this video it was especially important because we wanted it to feel like we were grabbing those moments- that they were not fabricated moments, even though obviously they were all fabricated.

Naturalism to me is fundamental to cinematography. Mastering naturalism is very difficult because you want to do something that looks realistic but also conveys emotion. But that’s only one part of cinematography, there are many other approaches, that’s one of the fundamentals. You’re trying to make something that to the naked eye looks natural, but in fact is sculpted and designed to elicit emotion and feelings. A lot of it has to do with not just the lighting but also the way you expose things, for example when you decide to put somebody in silhouette. There’s a shot in the video of a kid pointing a gun out of a window. It’s a very different choice to leave him in silhouette and obviously there can be detail outside, but it also conceals things about him and increases the tension that the audience feels because they can’t really see what this kid is doing or what he’s about. That’s a naturalistic choice but it’s also an expressive choice. In real life your eye can see the details, you’re not seeing a silhouette when you look at that kid, you can see what he’s doing and you can see everything outside. DP’s make those kinds of choices to conceal and reveal.

With the Jay Z video, I was trying the best I could to walk into a space and not do anything to it. If I had to do something to it, I’d try to make it as real as possible.

MVW: When shooting the scenes with Mark, was he specific in what he wanted?

JA: It depended, sometimes he was very specific about the framing he wanted; sometimes, he was even specific about the lighting. Mark would see something he didn’t like and would want me to change or adjust it a little bit. When it was working really well, at least for me and I think also for him, it was just a free for all. The height of that was during Jay Z’s performance in this kind of nasty club set up and in that it was really just freestyle. Mark would tell me to shoot from a certain angle and I would just go crazy with the camera. We would shoot until I was exhausted and then we’d do something else. Mark would definitely give me feedback, he could DP himself, and he is incredibly capable. He would tell me things that were missing or if he wanted it to have a different feeling or more energy. Because of the nature of photography, the camera operation was more like a performance than a normal thing where you’d go from A to B with this shot, it was more like getting my energy to a certain place. I really loved the fact that I was expressing with the camera all the time; in a way, that’s an unusual kind of opportunity.

CREDITS:

Production Co.: Anonymous
Producer: Mala Vasan
Director: Mark Romanek
DP: Joaquin Baca Asay
Production Designer: Happy Mase

Bec Stupak is a one-woman video machine. The poster child of a burgeoning VJ movement, Video DJ Honeygun hit the pages of Artbyte in 2001, billed as the leader of a new generation of video performers. Since then, through founding Honeygun Labs, she’s branched into a variety of video diversions – along the way garnering an award for Best Underground Music Video and a video remix for the Rolling Stones. Never quite comfortable being pigeonholed, she’s leapt from the music video scene into the gallery art space, showing pieces at the Whitney Biennial and now working as an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam.

Her latest project is a DVD ‘zine called Scissor Friends, the first of which was just shown in the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. MVWire correspondent Justin Kent caught up with her to discuss that project, along with her philosophy on video and her techno/creative process.

eJK: So how did you come up with the idea for Scissor Friends?

Honeygun: The DVD ‘zine thing came out of working on the Whitney project – we were in LA hanging out with all these zine makers, and there was a delay in me getting started on my piece of the project, so I started to make a video of all the little things in the apartment where we were staying and I set it to screwed down music (rap that’s been slowed down to 1/2 speed… you’re supposed to drink enough cough syrup so that you can hear it normally). It was kind of a trial of different kinds of styles – super rough, I bite a million things. Its kind of a throw-away… precious but disposable. That’s kind of the vibe of the whole thing. The second issue is a found footage porn piece. The third one is stereoscopic 3-D, so it comes with 3-D glasses, and the 4th/5th ones are going to be a double disc video where you have to play them both at the same time. Well, you don’t have to… but you can. They’ll consist of all infinite fill patterns (the black & white patterns that computers used back in the day to represent shades of lightness and darkness). The first one also explores different ways to watch video – in addition to the video itself, there is a video loop of a chihuahua taking a nap… so you can have a virtual pet.

eJK: And that was an offshoot of the Whitney piece you did with AVAF?

HG: I’ve been working with Assume Vivid Astro Focus for about three years. We started out creating a video to go with a wallpaper piece that my friend Eli Sudbrack wanted to do – it was made for a group show at White Columns in 2002. Since then, I’ve done video stuff with AVAF for a show at Deitch Projcets. We had a really large projection on the wall of the gallery and then the other walls, floor, and ceiling were covered with this very crazy wallpaper. It was also a music video, set to Yoko Ono’s Walking On Thin Ice, lipsynched by a beautiful amazing Brazilian tranny named Carla… it was super low budget. We did all the lighting, styling, setup, post, etc. It took quite a while (because there were only two of us working on it) but it came out well; it’s pretty nuts. Through that show, we got the Whitney Biennial thing. What I wanted to see happen there was a greater seamlessness between the video and how it fit in to the rest of the room. Everything in these installations is considered one small element of an overall piece… I wanted the video to feel like that too. Unilke our previous vids (which were made more like music videos), that one was created more like a live mixing piece – instead of editing, I made loops using the graphics from the rest of the installation and then at the opening, I mixed the piece live and recorded it.

eJK: So does the live aspect inform your offline process?

HG: Oh, yes, definitely. It’s a cool way of working on something. Mostly because you create little loops but don’t necessarilly draw connections between them until you mix.

eJK: Do you get to know what works and what doesn’t work because you actually get to see people’s reactions? A lot of DJs talk about cutting a track then demoing it in a club to get feedback from the audience.

HG: No, its not about crowd reaction… its more about being able to create video improvisationally as opposed to having to edit with premeditation – I can react to sound and music and environment.

eJK: So, what tools are there for working with video like that? What does your live rig consist of?

HG: I’m getting tired of schlepping gear everywhere – I really want to focus more on content… I put the brakes on doing events last December. It was just toooo much, it took so much time away from actually making video, doing what I love. For a while I’ve been a little burnt on that too though, so I’ve started knitting video objects instead, like videotapes.

eJK: Knitting?! That’s hot. So do you think that the VJ / Video DJ / whatever you wanna call it, is ever going to gain real credibility? It sounds like your distancing yourself from that side of things.

HG: I think its a mistake to say that the method of delivering video is the thing to pay attention to. I definitely still use the techniques, and the Whitney piece was all about that, but I think its important to place the emphasis on the artist… to value the artist’s vision more than the machines that they lay their hands on. My machines, I buy them… there is nothing that makes them particular to me, except that I’ve chosen to purchase a specific group of machines. It’s what I put on them that I want to be the focus.

I had an ephipeny when I saw Tracy + the Plastics. Wynne shows up with a DVD. The brilliance of her show is not what the video is being played on, the briliance of her show is that she’s great and funny and smart. The emphasis is on her, not that she’s clever with machines. So I’m trying to move away from fetishizing machines.

eJK: Yet you’re knitting VHS tapes.

HG: That kind of fetish is OK – it’s more about not participating in the gear arms race. I’m tired of having a stressful, intense, soul demanding job to pay for the gear arms race.

The elevator in my studio is my arch nemesis – it’s telling me to leave the gear in the studio – use it to create – don’t use it as the thing that gets you invited to do a show. It’s not about whether or not the medium will receive its day in the sun. I think it will, but in a way that is much richer than celebrating the medium alone. I think the people who have been working their asses off in the medium will receive their day in the sun – that’s much more important. The machines won’t be sad… as long as they are still loved in studios and bedrooms, they won’t be sad. And they will probably be happier not having beer spilled on them in dirty bars. What do you think of that?

eJK: Well, it’s sorta hard for me to swallow because my art actually is the machines. I’m so involved with the technology, it’s hard for me to break away from it. (Justin invented the video scratching EJ Turntable – Ed.)

HG: I know.

eJK: But I’ve been trying to get away from that side of things, too – more into content, less into the platform.

HG: The thing is, what can be made with your machines is unique. They’re interesting because what comes out of them is interesting. Another thing that’s different is that your machine is about showmanship – they take the performance (which is usually a boring, mouse-clicking type thing) and make it more physical, which is essential to a good performance.

eJK: But they are heavy and they hate beer.

HG: Everything I just said above has a caveat – its more from the perspective of an artist who is not a performer. I don’t necessarily consider myself a performer first, so I guess you could say that I’m moving away from performance.

eJK: I think that’s a good perspective, but for what it’s worth, I also think you are a good performer

HG: Thank you

eJK: Ninety-five percent of the performance happens before you get to the venue.

HG: Right. I guess I’m tired of not having that realized. Like, if I get paid to create graphics and mix live, I can get paid for the live mixing time, but not for the graphics time – which is 95% of it! That’s the hard part. I guess in some ways, its silly to make a distinction between them, but at the same time, its such a labor-intensive medium… I want the labor part to be appreciated.

eJK: You were on tour with Bacardi mixing video in 42 cities last year – that was a big production. What’s it like doing a high profile tour like that?

HG: I liked travelling… I did not like talking to really really drunk people who were asking me to play Sean Paul (again!). I liked being able to quit my job. I’ve liked this year of freelance that it gave me – it’s meant that I can do all sorts of things that I’ve always wanted to do (like study japanese). Other than that, its not like the tour was anything new, video-wise. Except maybe some hardcore road-testing of gear.

eJK: Japanese? Nice! So now you don’t need a translator.

HG: ie (that’s no). Actually… iie.

eJK: You’re sorta hard to slot into the existing categories. Out of all these different things you’re engaged in: what do you want people to remember you for?

HG: I don’t think I’ve done it yet. At the moment, I’m preparing to make a video that I’m really excited about. I kind of feel that everything I’ve done in the past six years has been an exploration, but it hasn’t been representative of my real vision – which has kind of been under wraps for a while. So this next piece will be a debut of that in a way. Yeah, my whole creative background is very chameleon… I was thinking about that recently. But this next piece is one that I want to be a stake in the ground. Nothing that I’ve done yet is something that I would say defines who I am stylistically. In fact, I feel like it’s all a costume… that it doesn’t represent my true nature at all. But this piece will.

eJK: Seeing you perform seems to do a pretty good job showing who you are.

HG: Stylistically, the live stuff is of a culture that I was never a part of socially… it’s all me in a lot of ways, but at the same time, it’s also a compromise.

My new piece is related to Jack Smith, and there was one quote about him, saying that he was a fabulist. I loved that. I wish that were an art style… like Post-Modernist. Fabulist. There are definitely other artists that fit into that realm too, so I suppose it could be a movement of sorts.

I’m also trying to create a lot of material in new asthetics… after doing a tour of live mixing, I got very tired of the old asthetic, so that’s been my focus. The AVAF stuff is really different. The dvd zine project I’m working on with Eyebeam is really different. I’m really excited about the movie shoot I’m gearing up for next weekend. It’s something I’ve wanted to shoot for five years or so, it’s the movie I’ve had in my head since I was 15! Once I shoot it, I’ll have a lot of material that is really different from stuff I’ve had in the past, so I’m thinking of doing a side project where I create live mixable visuals off of the shoot – in addition to the film, like a remix – just to see what happens. I want to be more experimental, I want a more natural combination of live mixing stuff and edited post stuff.

eJK: OK, so in closing – what’s the Honeygun philosophy?

HG: Make video! Live life! I’m learning that input is as important as output. I’ve always been a little too weighted on the output end of things, but now I’m investing in the input too! Days in the park, hanging out with friends, etc. There’s more to life than sitting behind the newest, hottest, fastest computer. (that’s nice too, though)

Nathan “Karma” Cox has an MTV award for his work on Linkin Park’s “In the End” video and he just started up his own production company called Creature. We asked Nathan a few questions about his latest project “The Red” and the treatment writing process for a performance video.

THE SONG:

NC:The song is “The Red” about releasing this tension when you see the red everything goes crazy. We got the song and a budget and just came up with an idea.

The band is made up of three brothers and apparently early on in the bands career, when they were younger, they would bicker and fight and it turned to fist fighting, occasionally, while they were touring and stuff. The label mentioned that one of the band members especially, when he was younger, had some anger management issues. It’s about him seeing red whenever he would get pissed off.

The basic idea was pretty literal, they wanted to something about anger management to go with the idea of the song. The song was really specific so it was easy to write something to fit it. I just loved the idea of taking a normal situation, something as controlled as a 12 step type program meeting. Right from the get go the label was very supportive, they thought the idea was perfect for the song.

MEETING THE BAND

NC: For the most part my career is based on people I already knew or had a personal relationship with. So this is one of the first videos where I had never met the band and had no idea what they were going to be like. The guys came in a day before the shoot, and they’re from a big family of about 8-10 brothers and sisters. They’re just three of the brothers from the family. They’re all gear heads, and they are big car guys, hence the name Chevelle.

BUILDING UP TO A FIGHT

NC: The casting was one of the best casting sessions I have ever had because these guys were just perfect. The success of the video really relied on who these characters were. Just being able to have people who could be bizarre, be a little off kilter and then be able to spazz out in the end was great!

Also, I had a buddy of mine who has a t-shirt company, somewhere here in LA, and this guy is a very successful businessman, but for some reason he’s got this character that’s like a roadie guy he plays in his life when he is not working. He has a full mullet, the handle bar mustache and drives around the full Bert Reynolds bandit car, a Trans Am, black with the gold eagle on the front. He loves to be this guy and will roll into any party and just act like that white trash jack ass and really flip people out, but its all kind of his inside joke. Anyway he came down and I thought he would be perfect for it as well.

We knew that we wanted to build the suspense and the tension that would lead up to the climax. We set up these little scenarios were people are looking at each other and giving dirty looks here and there. For the most part during the shooting I would just yell out, “you try this and you try that.”

So during that process everyone in the room had the ability to get crazy or do something pretty simple. We just set up those scenarios as we were shooting and covered the crowd. I wanted to give each guy a moment to sort of start small and build up a little bit get more stress and stuff. Then the fight sequence was really fun.

We were just getting ready to start the fight sequence, and I like to start shooting wide with the stuff I am not sure about, because I know where to cut into later on. The song builds we are going to hit this point where the fight starts and I want Rob The Mullet guy to pick up a chair and chuck it across the room and knock over some chairs and that was the only action I gave.

We start wide and the camera starts moving. We get in the right position and I go, “Rob throw the chair.” He stands up throws the chair and everyone in the room went ape shit. They just started grabbing shit and attacking each other. Then it got crazy, like dude someone is going to get hurt. They are throwing chairs around and throwing stuff at each other and it just got crazy and when the take was over everyone just roared. I was so happy. I was like, this is going to be easy from here on out, it is just going to be fun. We kept going with it setting up little scenarios and smashing tables and flipping s… over.

THE SODA CAN

NC: The idea is, as the meeting is progressing and the tension is building the doors slam shut and their like submarine pressure locked doors, the pressure in the room builds and the can crushes on its own from the tension. The can has “Karma” cola written on it. I come from that graffiti background so I try and throw a tag in there somewhere, pretty much all my videos there will be one Karma somewhere.

LIGHTING

NC: What we did is we took out the fluorescents that already existed in the lighting fixtures and replaced them with our own. We wired them all through a switcher so that with a flip of a switch that it would go from the normal light source to hitting a button and they would all start cycling. Running them through the switcher was a real pain in the ass because there were a s… load of lights. We had a guy on the side and during certain cues in the music, we would just give him a signal and he would set them off.

I think what we attempted to do was to get the lighting where it was all overhead and it was all sort of pure light. Once we got in there, we didn’t want to have to fuck with it too much. So once it was pre-set we were pretty much locked in and we could just switch out between them and just have to adjust the stops here and there. I like to work that way because it gives us a lot of freedom. It’s really a pain in the ass when you have to re-light for every shot. It’s really time consuming and it can really suck the hours out of a day.

CUTTER

NC: The DP was Cutter. It was the first time I had ever used cutter and he was great. It turned out a couple of his crew guys were buddies of mine from back in my old punk rock drinking days.

IDEAS FOR PERFORMANCE VIDEO

NC: What is tough about treatment writing is that everyone wants to see a performance, which is to a large extent a marketing tool. It is essentially a commercial, so we need to sell the band and make them look great. That being said, practically every performance scenario you can imagine has been done to an extent. Unless you are doing CG and you want to put them on the moon or you want to put them somewhere completely abstract, just picking a location and slamming them in there, which is generally the budgets that are being done right now, everything has been done.

You have the band performing on a rooftop, in the woods, in a warehouse, etc. Those are all my videos too, you know I did twenty videos in a row of bands performing in a warehouse somewhere because we didn’t have the budget for anything else. Imagine every single scenario and I can name five videos that have it. It’s a real tough one and then try to tie in a story line revolving around that location.

I think that is the hardest part with lower budget videos, trying to consolidate your locations so that you don’t have to do a major production move in the middle of a shoot, cause that will kill you time wise. Unless you can get a really great producer, who can have one team pre-lighting on one location while you are shooting somewhere else, but without the money to pay these guys it gets really difficult.

For me I have to think about that before I start writing, what exactly can we afford and where can we create it. Chevelle’s “The Red” video was a perfect example of how that treatment worked well. The whole video takes place in one room and a hallway.

Production Co: Creature
Producer: Matt Caltabiano
Director: Nathan Cox
DP: Jeff Cutter
Editor: Mario Mares
Telecine: Dave Hussey
Production Designer: Jeremy Reed