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| 20 January 2009 |
| Video Clips |
MATT RICHARDS: It's a really interesting time to be doing music videos because, I guess, the culture of media and music promotion and everything is changing. So, music videos, a lot of people would say, they're almost redundant now, because all a band needs to do is get a friend to shoot them on a handycam to sell their live performance, whack it on YouTube or MySpace and then they can go tour wherever. But in order for a band to be taken seriously on the next level, then they need some kind of professional product. When I was 14 and I would have sat up late at night and watched 'Rage' and I would have seen just one clip, you know, that absolutely blew my mind and I was gobsmacked. And if we didn't do what we do, then I think there'd be kids that wouldn't get that. Trainwreck 20/20 is me and my partner, Jeremy Rouse. We both met at film school. Mine and Jeremy's favourite is still the Purplene 'Love: Western' clip. We had a bunch of ideas and we had a couple of locations sorted. Got there, went to a theatre production and we were both watching this play which had puppetry in it, and we kind of thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could shoot some of the clip in here?" And that's kind of the way we usually work, is by that sense of community and just pooling resources from everywhere to get stuff done. If you can't buy it, then you've got to beg for it or borrow it or... And we don't steal. You know, I could come up with an idea and tell it to you, but the way you visualise it in your head is a lot different to the way that I might have it visualised in my head. And what might sound cool to me might not sound cool to you. And often it's not until we actually go out there with a digital camera and mock it up with ourselves standing how the band would be, can they actually see how it's gonna look. For ages I'd wanted to do this thing with people flying through the air. This song was one of the ones that we listened to, and it's punctuated by these stab sounds. And when I listened to it, I was like, "We could get these guys flying over the band and stuff." But this one especially is... ..when I was saying to you, like, you know, your idea of a cool thing and trying to sell it to a band, it's like, "So I was gonna have you guys in wetsuits with goggles on and there's gonna be these flying fish things." And... You know, it's a hard sell. Probably the most satisfying is to get that perfect combination of doing something... ..a visual equivalent to a band that you have a lot of respect for. I mean, the music comes first. Every band wants to look cool, OK? It's a fact. You could pretty much kill a band by mismatching the people that are doing the music video to the music. And one of the hardest things in trying to do music videos for bands that you have a lot of respect for is that you have to earn their respect as well. They're putting a huge amount of trust in you because you're basically representing them. It's very challenging. But when you get it right, it's extremely satisfying and you can kind of look at it and go, "Yeah, alright! I nailed it." |
