It’s been a crazy nine months so far – we can’t really describe it. Somehow it feels like it’s been a long time, but we know that this is just the beginning. Coming from a super DIY background, to fuller sets, to gaining support from production companies across the globe is super surreal.

We were privileged enough to work with a hot, new band called MS MR for our first music video since signing with Legs.

It was an insane turnaround with a pretty small budget so we had to kill ourselves in order to get everything the way we wanted. The band had this idea of paying tribute to the 80s TV show, TV PARTY, which we found out was basically a show that featured a close community of bands who came on really stoned and kind of “performed”. It seemed to be a show where anything could happen. Lizzy, from MS MR, is actually the co-founder of the label Neon Gold, which has some amazing artists on the roster. She gathered them up and we went on to shoot something with the same sort of vibe.

The idea then developed and we decided to mix in other public access skits/scenes. We wanted it to be super chaotic, random and static-y, like a malfunctioning old TV, flickering through an array of channels. The hardest part in this was shooting all of the skits and making them look authentic. We found an old Hi8 cam in Kyle’s attic, got it to work, and ran it throughout the shoot.

During the shoot we passed the Hi8 around to people we trusted in filming and it totally brought about a randomness to the footage. We were also running the Alexa and an additional DVX cam. At the end of the shoot, we had an hour of footage from each camera. Funnily enough, most of the footage we used in the video was from the Hi8 cam.

When we finished the cut, it was really cool because the legal team at Columbia thought we had used unauthorized stock footage. Our producer was just like, “that stuff is all real…” It took them a while to fully believe in us.

Along with Lizzy and Max of MS MR, we didn’t want it to be a period piece, so we decided to mix in modern, graphic elements to the video as well. Ultimately, we were going for something that felt sort of retro but modern, quirky and lovable.

MS MR are really into glitchy stuff, as are we, so it was loads of fun coming up with these weird scenes/compositions. We definitely can’t say it was easy, though, because as we said, the turnaround was like a week and a half and all the things we were attempting to do took a LOT of post time. This required us to take action, so we collaborated with a 2D animator and another designer/animator to help us out in post.

We randomly found Evan Borja on Vimeo one day when we were mindlessly browsing. We both watched one of his films called, “Otzi”, and it had us giggling because it reminded us of one of those pre-feature, short films before Pixar movies. His quirky work really amused us and we thought he’d be a perfect fit for the project.Then we found out he’d just graduated from the college we both went to. Willie, our other dude, is someone I (Alex) met more than five years ago because he was my sister’s roommate’s boy friend. He happens to work at ODD NY, which is a creative studio in NY– and he’s so great! We ended up creating a really efficient, NYC based team and everyone got along well.

In the end, working with MS MR was the most enjoyable experience so far, as they trusted us to do whatever we wanted, and because they really share a similar taste in aesthetics with us. We’d write a treatment for them any day. We really had a blast with this new video and we’re ready to go harder!