Five Days in Philly

Hi friends,

This week’s post is going to be more photos and fewer words than usual. Brain is fried. Can’t compute.

We wrapped five days in Philly grabbing as much photo & video for the new album as we could. Friends of Doom Tripping said people might be interested in what vaguely goes into a video shoot, so this is that recap. It’ll probably make more sense in the coming months when everything starts to release.

Easy prep day. The band lands from LA at 4:30p. The rest of the crew drives down from NYC around the same. We convene at the crew Airbnb at 6p and order food. After dinner have a production meeting and talk through the shoot days. We divvy up the tasks that Mitchell (producer/director), Eric (producer/director) and I (producer) couldn’t get done during the week. It mostly involves running around town grabbing props.

The band makes a last minute run out to Kohls because we forgot some costumes.

While the band makes their prep runs, the crew and I head out to NJ film a visualizer segment with a special guest. To get a shot we have to drive through a McDonald’s drive-thru four times.

I should pause for a moment and pitch the idea for the weekend. We’ve always made pretty low-budget videos, and a lot of this album laments our current and near future moment where we have to endlessly feed the algorithm with our short form, vertical video content that might be making us dumber, so I got the bright idea to film a bit of content for every song on the album.

So when I say visualizer, I’m talking about something super low-cost (like $20) and meant to be easy to grab. Originally my pitch was just to film me driving around singing the entire album and film that, but Mitchell and Eric pushed us to be a little more creative and come up with equally silly ideas for each song (a few still happen in my car though).

After the NJ segment, we head back to the house to shoot the band member specific visualizers — one for everyone else. This is some of the most fun we’ve ever had shooting stuff. Just an incredible group of people goofing around for 6 hours.

Even with a low-budget idea for each song on the album, we still need to film actual proper music videos (with everything coming out of the same budget). We head to a green screen cyclorama on the 17th floor of a building in Center City to do just that. We have to load in our entire backline and camera gear, making this the longest load-in push we’ve ever had as a band.

We film two full-length music videos and grab some band promo shots during the 8 hours at the location.

After loading out we head back to the rental and film another car segment, this time with a much scarier rig. We manage three takes (including one where I mistakenly head the wrong way down a one way) before calling it after a 16 hour day.

Only one video and some promos today at a very cool venue in Philly (that we may or may not be playing in the near future). It’s an “easy” day but everyone is fried by the time we wrap. The footage looks incredible. Everyone is grateful for such a smooth shoot.

We’re supposed to shoot more promo shots in NYC on Tuesday but pivot because it sounds rough.

Instead we spend the morning shooting promos in and around the crew’s rental while cleaning out the mess (like our cakes). Quick goodbyes and the NYC crew heads back to drop off hard drives to our editor, who has 3 days to deliver the first cut of video one.

I drop the band off at their place. We all go home, eat, and sleep.

Much more to come from all this, including a trove of behind-the-scenes footage we had a dedicated crew member shooting.

Big weeks ahead. Talk soon.

-D

Watching:
I literally just watched Rick & Morty every night until I was nearly passed out on the couch.

Reading:
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (though I read maybe 10 pages this week)