VIDEO #1: “If We Could Escape”
The idea I’ve always had is a walking video – I start in one place, something prompts me to get up, the camera is walking backwards in front of me (maybe kind of low, so I can “get in your face a bit”), and ultimately we end up right back where we started. (If we could escape from this, we would choose not to.)
Maybe I’m sitting reading a newspaper outside of a cafe, I get up with the purpose of going somewhere deliberately, I have a bit of adventure, the viewer loses sense of where I am, and like it was what I was looking, I sit back down at the same seat outside the cafe, and go back to reading the same paper.
It always seemed like this one should feel light and fun and exciting, not too serious. Maybe it feels like one shot, but it doesn’t have to be one shot. The big snare/guitar sixteenth-note hits could be cutaways from the action. The bridge could maybe have some sped-up bits.
Main Inspirations & Vibe
BECK • BOB DYLAN • ELLIOT SMITH
Video Inspiration
VIDEO #2: “The Day Before”
There’s a mood to this song that involves lights and shadows, halls and tunnels, time and clocks. This one is much broodier, more dramatic, slow-paced, plenty of stillness.
Some quick ideas:
- It might be fun to play with overlaying takes, like do one take of me doing something on a line, then film the same thing and fade between the takes so you can see both of them?
- Film long shots of clocks, then play them at a faster speed backwards?
- Any “backwards” trickery?
- Other time-lapse tricks, forwards and backwards?
- Could there be a story? Like I’m trying to make a clock that takes me to the day before? Maybe I’m the one fixing the clocks in my repair shop, and secretly also a patron of the shop asking myself to make a timepiece that takes me to the day before? Like it’s a Djinn particle (something stuck in a time loop, like the watch in Somewhere In Time). Like if we found some kind of old antique shop that we could use during off-hours, that could be a cool setting. Obviously, this is too big of an idea, but it’s fun to imagine, and some part of that story could be abstractly added to any other shoot ideas.
- Riffing on the backwards idea: it could be really cool if the first verse was a move from A to B, and the chorus was somehow played in reverse back to point A, and it kind of “starts over.”
Main Inspirations & Vibe
BECK • THOM YORKE • PHOEBE BRIDGERS • MY BRIGHTEST DIAMOND • PETER GABRIEL • BON IVER • IRON & WINE