Oh wow, I found a 2016 blog entry I wrote but forget to post! This concerns the EP In A Day 3 sequence, which ultimately became the grant-winning, NFSA-showcasing (and increasingly ambitious) This Band Will Self-Destruct.

Presented below for your immediate pleasure:

I said to Nick the other day – half-joking – these sessions have started to feel like The Five Obstructions, except we are now onto obstructions 13 through 20. There’s only so many ways to make a music video out of an in-studio band performance. To counter this, we’ve spent more time ahead of filming generating ideas to differentiate each song. In the first Ep In A Day, all the songs were filmed with an identical camera set-up; the challenge was making each unique via editing and post-production tricks. In EP In A Day 2, I went in with specific ideas about filming/framing each song differently – for instance, I knew I wanted to film only close-ups of each performer’s face in My Own Little Girl, and I wanted a single take for Song To Be Played In The Event Of My Death.

For EP In A Day 2, the point of difference is wardrobe, set design and lighting.  Nick engaged the services of Imogen Keen, one of Canberra’s best and most in-demand stage designers. I came in with some strong ideas, and over several meetings between the three of us, we hashed out four different set-ups.

At a You Are Here meeting a couple of years ago, someone said they always throw out their first idea because it’s invariably terrible or lazy. I could not disagree more. To me, a primary idea is undoubtably stronger than a secondary one, and I remain a firm advocate in the adage ‘first thought, best thought’. Lightbulbs is testament –  literally, I had Nick hold a lightbulb. It’s not without precedent – I love concert footage of Tom Waits with a similar apparatus to what we used.

The remaining band is filmed (and lit) by a roving spotlight attached to the camera.  The song is lyric-heavy, and Imogen struck upon the idea to highlight the words – these hang in cut-up segments strung above the performer’s heads – a point of interest in the inky darkness. The band is in white, providing a unity and simplicity to the set-up  – it also helps them stand out against the background.

My one concern at the outset was length – at nearly eight minutes, I worried the lighting gambit wouldn’t be enough. Thankfully, Nick is an increasingly magnetic screen presence – the clip leans on his ability to deliver the song direct to camera.

My Captain Obvious tendencies also resulted in a warmer/brighter light each time Nick sung ‘sun’ (get it?). Aside from the lyrical connection, it gave needed variation to the palette.  Some makeshift strobe lighting at the end complemented the rhythmic change in the outro, serving as a adrenaline hit (and recalling the lighting in numerous metal videos).

When coming up with ideas for music videos, my process is to listen to the song a few times, writing ideas as they come. Most are junk, but rough diamonds always emerge. Typically, I get one strong visual, and then build outwards. In Lightbulbs, it was Nick holding the bulb to his face. In this case, I saw the band looking towards a camera above, spinning as if in a Busby Berkeley sequence.

It didn’t make it into the clip, but something Technicolor and Busby Berkeley inspired (albeit on a Playschool budget) was the genesis for this bright and camp video. The set design is an abstraction on an under-the-water theme – the blue balloons are the ocean, the green netting is seaweed, the pink metallic streamers are… I don’t know, coral? I don’t know if it’s because the song is the most up-tempo of the group, or if it’s because it was the last performance of the day, but the excitement and energy of the band is palpable. The last things we filmed were the band goofing around – this included everyone swapping instruments and miming along.  A special shout-out to drummer/bandleader Grahame Thompson for his fully committed lead singer performance – probably the funniest moment in a day full of them. One day the footage of that incendiary performance will emerge (slash be leaked by me) and leave all lesser front-persons running for their mothers.

My other idea for this clip – and one of my favourite things I’ve filmed – is a mimed story about a relationship played out through the studio window. I still can’t believe how well this worked out – in most art-making you aim bigger than you need, knowing you will fall short. This is the rare occurrence where reality exceeded my expectations – all credit should go to the performers Aaron Kirby and Fiona McLeod (and to Nick for casting them). I explained the concept to Aaron and Fi and then they invented their own routine, far funnier and personal than what I envisioned. It’s a mid-video Easter Egg and I love how it is not referenced or explained in any way – just a slice of vaudeville sandwiched into a live performance.

Talking with Imogen and Nick in our pre-production meetings, our most elaborate ideas were reserved for this clip. I remember looking over my notes and having a panic attack – if we’d proceeded with what we had in mind, this clip would have taken all day to shoot.

Essentially, our raft of visual ideas needed set-up and filming independent of the actual song recording. In many ways, this is the natural progression for the series (the closer the sessions move to full-blown music videos, the happier I am – it’s more my wheelhouse than documenting live performance). In other ways, it’s a digression (and a distraction) from the central premise of the project.

However, removed from these philosophical concerns, it remained unfeasible to add more set-ups to what would already be our longest and most exhausting EP In A Day yet. We did keep the coolest one though – the idea of opening on a wound bleeding through a shirt. Imogen came up with the apparatus (and brought the blood) – however, in testing we used up two of our three white t-shirts. We got the shot on our third and last try, but I think our second attempt looked better on film. Unfortunately, the second attempt was with cameraman/stand-in Shane Parsons wearing the shirt – this meant I couldn’t use it for the opening, but I did end up using it (reversed) in the closing of the clip.

Another high-minded idea was an overarching throughline across all four videos. Eyelash opens the sequence with the band waking up, beginning in a seated/static position, and with a desaturated palette. Deadly Game Of Cat & Mouse is the last video – thus we start with the least animated and conclude with the most animated (emphasis on animated, DGOC&M being the most cartoonish). We don’t integrate this throughline as successfully in the other videos but I like that we were thinking of these things, and it’s something I want to explore further in other sessions (and other projects).

When I heard we had a set designer, this was one of the first ideas I had – to dress two different spaces and have Nick perform in one and the band in the other, only revealing at the end they are performing next to each other. The rest built from ideas Nick and Imogen had about making one space warm and earthy, the other cool and silvery. Nick performs a series of costume changes while singing the song, which also must have come from him or Imogen – while Nick always rises to these challenges, it’s a big ask for a performer and not one I’d be inclined to suggest.

On the day, camera maverick Shane Parsons had the idea to film Nick’s section in portrait. It’s a novel (and cool) idea which also serves to further differentiate the two segments. Filmmakers rarely monkey with aspect ratios and split-screens (especially during a piece) – I think part of this is that it dates a film to a specific era. Knowing this, and still using it for aesthetic effect, is increasingly in vogue – Grand Budapest Hotel is one of the recent (and most successful) examples. More and more music videos are tinkering with framing (particularly portrait vs. landscape, noting their audience use smartphones to watch their content). Recent great videos from Chance The Rapper, Pusha T, and Charli XCX all shirk from using the entire widescreen/landscape frame available to them. For Going Home, I wanted to treat the frame similarly – to not feel obliged to fill it up entirely and to mess with people’s expectations around size and spatial relationships.

The great thing about launching 12 narrative-linked music videos is that there’s no Actual Way to do that. So for instance, setting up a gallery installation where each video sits within it’s own ‘set’ incorporating materials and visual themes from the making of said videos- well that can’t be less wrong than any other way of doing it.

Often once I have to explain something to an audience, that’s when I realise what the thing actually is. So it goes with This Band Will Self-Destruct, which it eventuates is An Album That Is A Room That You Can Walk Around In. Duh.

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(The installation was basically lit 100% by the video screens so these room-lights-on photos by Imogen can only do the best they can to communicate what the audience was seeing)

The idea for staging the work this way came of some great advice I got from my long-time band-mate/mentor Julia Johnson, who pointed out that a gallery-style engagement with the videos might give an audience license to take their time and engage with the videos as the One Big Piece that they actually are.

I pitched the idea to Art Not Apart, the annual one-day festival that has steadily grown out the strange mists of the developer-funded-arts-and-culture experiment that is New Acton. In a huge piece of fluke-y luck it turned out that they were using the National Film and Sound Archive as their main venue for the festival, and within seconds my ambitions for the work had quadrupled. The totally rad selection of vintage screens and TVs in the NFSA collection allowed for 12 individual AV set-ups with their own aesthetic pop, and as we looked at the available selections we were blown away by how many natural resonances between the videos and the gear presented themselves.

By ‘we’ I mean installation producer Nick McCorriston and TBWSD Designer Supreme Imogen Keen. The over-the-top tech demands and space design reqs, not to mention the absurdly tight time frame, were almost 100% outside my skill set. I was so so lucky that NickMc was free and keen to put it all together, his extensive experience at You Are Here festival (among many other things) has made him an elite-level creator of weird tech-heavy shows on limited resources. Of course it was amazing to have Imogen carry her fabulously coherent and rigorous design parameters from the videos on through into the final exhibition space, she really made it sing as if all was planned from the start. My favorite parts of what she did were the totally whimsical touches like having one video presented in a portable back-pack and having a display case set up with costumes from the shoot.

We took care to try and have each video presented in a way that resonated with their form and content. For instance, you had to watch Lightbulbs inside an isolation booth that made your surrounds as claustrophobic as the band was in the vid. The soap-y teen-pop aesthetic of Doomed was ramped up by having it playing on a kids’ laptop covered in stickers. The late-night-public-access-am-I-really-seeing-this of Anywhere was shown on a tiny CCTV screen that you had to kneel down and peer at.

One of the vintage TVs could only play black-and-white, so Luke did up a black-and-white version of Save My Brain, the video that had been working least well in the edit. Turned out it was meant to be a black-and-white vid all along. So much of this project has been defined by these happy accidents, or maybe they’re just the natural emergent outcomes of collaboration.

We had dozens of people through on the day and it was a real thrill to see them work slowly around the room, taking headphones on and off. The fact that this version worked so well on such short notice makes me very optimistic for what version we might do now with a bit of lead time. It’ll be hard if not impossible to find screens as cool as this version had though.

Regular readers know that Luke and I have been juggling our usual foolhardy amount of different projects over the past year. Well, lurking behind all of those projects was perhaps the biggest thing we’ve worked on as a team, something so sprawling and multi-pronged that we’ve waited until every part of it was done so that we can now launch it with an obnoxiously strident three-month rollout.

It started with me applying for an ArtsACT grant to fund three of my ongoing EP-In-A-Day series, where I create a band for one day and arrange then record four live versions of four original songs while Luke shoots a video for each song. So I got the grant, and that shot of encouragement was all I needed to instantly decide that the whole thing has to be bigger, weirder and again I say weirder.

Maybe there’s someone else making full-blown narrative music videos where the sets, costumes and performance are created and captured at the exact same time that the final live take of the song is arranged and performed for posterity. I don’t know that there is but their might be. Either way, that’s what we did, twelve times across three days across one year. We roped in a raging house party’s worth of incredible musicians, producers, actors, dancers and filmmakers. The core team of myself, Luke, Sam ‘Eardoll of Millions’ King and Adam ‘Recorder of our whole lives’ Thomas was completed by Imogen ‘really maybe the best production designer alive’ Keen, who I will be aiming to have at the centre of all my projects for the rest of time. 

As a team we made four complete and distinct units of Music Video in three 14-hour sessions, an effort that took incredible goodwill, cooperation and skill from all involved. The narrative of the videos started as a loose thread of existential angst and ramped up into a starkly-rendered character sketch; one man’s doomed attempt to defeat his own mortality through pop music, and his loved ones’ attempt to snap him out of it, help him calm down or maybe even enable him further. 

At heart it’s me presenting songs to you so there’s all the usual attendant nervousness that comes with that. Still, so many wonderful people did so much good work on this that  I can’t wait for you to see the results. The first video drops this week, and announcements about the live launch event will be right on it’s heels! 

Luke- We heralded the new year with the release of the music video for Worked Up, taken from our EP Forever Together.

I wrote our friend Tom Woodward into the video before asking him if he’d like to be involved. When I pitched him the part of a sketchy drug dealer, he immediately accepted, throwing up a stack of excellent wardrobe ideas, and in a huge commitment to character and authenticity (there are no small roles), he suggested he would even get a spray tan. I told him if he was willing to do it, our budget would cover his costs. The results speak for themselves.

Speaking of wardrobe, Nick’s guideline for our clothes was ‘extreme normcore’. He mentioned he was going to wear an old torn-up t-shirt. I said I’d do the same – when I met him on the first day of shooting, we discovered both our t-shirts were torn in exactly the same place. Given the ease of the rest of the shoot, it re-affirmed my belief that these kinds of weird synchronous events are in fact a favourable sign from the gods.

When I have the option I always like to shoot in Queanbeyan (it’s New York to my Woody Allen), and as self-appointed location scout, we filmed at my place (natch), Tom’s place (around the corner from mine), the Wallaby Motel, the local Hungry Jack’s, and the Donald Road Convenience Store (conveniently operated by my Faux Faux Amis bandmate Kevin Lauro).

I’ve long wanted to film something inside Kev’s store – every time I walk in I think of the Quick Stop in Clerks. It’s like a portal into an American film universe – there’s even a slushie machine! Kev was incredibly magnanimous in allowing us to shoot there, even letting us do so while the store was still open (his equally patient customers stepped lightly over and around us, quizzical looks on their faces). That’s Kev’s son Alistair playing the role of cashier – not a huge stretch of his acting chops, but I reckon the kid’s got a bright future.

Nick’s outline for the clip called for ‘dancers dancing in a dirty white void with sleazy lighting’. The first thing that popped into my mind was the brilliant video for Pusha T’s King Push.

It’s latter half (a pristine lit background, with Pusha in shadow in the foreground) was my jumping-off point. Once it was shot, I spent some time layering footage and blending it with different attributes, generating several unique looks. I settled on just two for this video (there’s already enough going on!), but I’ve now got plenty of ideas for subsequent clips.

I’ll leave Nick to write about the hotel scenes, other than to say I was incredibly impressed with his fearless performance. Matt Lustri (aka Housemouse) was also a complete natural in front of the camera, and I was surprised to learn it was his first experience in a music video!

Parts remind of those music videos cobbled together from tour and behind the scenes footage… except we filmed it all specifically. Nick and I are both fans of ‘music video logic’, which adheres more to the rules of cinema than television, and prizes mood and texture and novelty and style over the straightforward delivery of information. In my opinion, the more we could leave unexplained, the stronger the impact. To do this but still maintain some coherence was a challenge. My solution was to edit the story beats sequentially and then to layer other footage over the top. That way there is still a throughline (from diner to store to Tom’s to studio to motel) with flash-forwards continually hinting at future scenes. I’ve had one person tell me it’s too busy but it’s a favoured style for me and I think the juxtaposition of shots and rhythm and lyrics adds several other layers of meaning than if it was cut in a more undemanding manner.

As always, Lou was the unsung hero of production, manning the camera and doing everything else from applying make-up bruises to operating the disco lights. Plus, she is seven months pregnant! She is far too good for all of us.

The clip ends with a coda of Nick and I carrying our gear (and drummer – the redoubtable Grahame Thompson) off into the night. The music playing is a snippet of Defenceless, another song from our EP and our next video. In a grindhouse flourish, I originally had the clip end with a freeze-frame and the text ‘Babyfreeze will return in Defenceless’ superimposed. At the last second, like Coco Chanel’s advice, I took it off, letting the music speak for itself.

Nick- The steady development of Louise McGrath into a full-blown film-maker has leveled up the whole Lick Nuke operation. I feel like we’re finally hitting 100% of what’s in our heads and it’s great that the first fruits of that is in support of Worked Up, a track that’s gotta be in my top 3 Luke McGrath compositions.

I’ve become disgracefully reliant on the shorthand of reference and sensibility between Luke and myself. I’d previously written fully-blown scripts for the videos we made together, conscientiously putting everything down in professional script format (Courier New and everyfing!). This time I just wrote a half-page treatment for my idea and then we talked it over for a couple months. Central to my concept was fulfilling my years-long ambition of getting legendary Phoenix-dancefloor-star Robbie Karmel to dance in the clip (he’s also an amazing artist and you’ll be checking out his stuff right now). Once he was locked in we rounded out the dance troupe with the immortally fierce Emma McManus and Lisa Divissi (Luke and my dancing got cut).

A lot of my favorite hip hop and pop vids bounce confidently between seemingly unrelated settings and narratives, tied together by the sense of the performers identity. I also love the way a music video can endlessly call back to moments once they’ve been established. With those two elements in mind I came up with three separate ‘story strands’, each of which we shot as aggressively linear and coherent short films in their own right. Then I asked Luke to throw narrative coherence out the window and use the footage as raw material for a dizzying mood piece, cut to the music above all else.

My original concept for the hotel scene was way more explicit and more in line with the homoerotic lyrics of the song, but turning it into a solo ‘date night’ streamlined the visuals and created a great set-up for Housemouse’s star turn. It’s funny that sexualised male nudity (and sure, masturbation) in video clips is still a relative novelty, but in this case it was a simple matter of following the implications of the song. It’s also funny that this video crystallizes the notion of Babyfreeze as a two-piece just as we’ve morphed into more of a collective. The next video will certainly reflect that change!