My name's Dennis and I like film and music. I'd gone to the same high school (Macleans College) as the guys from FFoF and had heard their first original, Only the Hopeful quite a few times at various gigs. I loved the song.
A distinctive and serene melody with humbucker arpeggios in the verse and a really modern, energy charged chorus, not to mention bass and guitar solos galore convinced me that this was indeed a very 'cinematic' and visual piece of music. And plus they had a band name which, when abbreviated, had three F's and an O, which is sort of similar to Effo, which has two F's, an O and an E. Or maybe I was just instinctively knew I wanted to shoot this song.
So about a month after leaving school I had an epiphany. It wasn't one of those prophetic ones where you'd see white light and the KFC Colonel, it was more like me thinkin', "What the hell, I wanna make a music video and these guys have an awesome song. What am I waiting for?" One afternoon in December I had a conversation with Henry, and that was pretty much it.
Fast forward to May this year: I met up with the band and we recorded the song in about three takes with two microphones at Brad's house. After getting the sound file onto a computer we did nothin' to it. It was bare bones to the core, no mixing, no compression, no EQ'ing - a live recording done in a living room, exactly what we wanted:
A totally indie and low-fi sound to go with the guerilla filmmaking terms. This was my first music video as a director/editor and their first music video as a band, and we wanted something raw and down to earth.
Two days of shooting.
One crew.
One camera.
One computer.
After a month of lethal potato chip consumption and furious editing, the video was done. Now I've got something to blame my heart condition on.
The vid's style is a fusion of many inspirations, most notably:
A Ha - 'Take On Me' (for it's rotoscoping visual style),
Dashboard Confessional - 'Vindicated' (for the comic book panels),
Incubus - 'Drive',
and
Audioslave - 'Like a Stone'.
While Dashboard Confessional's 'Vindicated' merely remediated the comic book panels, we wanted to go one step further and remediate the entire storytelling format of comic books and graphic novels within the video. Thus, there were plenty of cheesy 'Rocky' metaphors, superhero nicknames, a condensed narrative style and a lot of noir-esque lighting. The only things we didn't do were the 'Pow!' and 'Whap!' sound effects, and I stand by that decision, for I was not one to endorse physical violence.
As for the painterly effect, we didn't exactly hand animate the video frame by frame, despite our admiration for the work in Waking Life. However, we did output around 3000 individual still frames into Photoshop Elements, applying the 'fresco' filter to selected takes, and blending them in with the raw video footage to make it seem like the band were transforming from people into comic book characters.
What is the meaning of life? Why do Starburst Gummi Fruits taste so good? Why do I walk into lamp posts on a regular basis?
I only know the answer to one of those questions, but what I really want to say is; the making of the video was an awesome experience and a lot of fun.
Last Updated: 6 July 2005
