As a self-establishing freelance director, it's nearly impossible to come across clients that let you run wild with creative control and style, much less bring seemingly insane ideas to life.
I met the gentlemen in Lucky & Wild over the summer of 2012, in preparation to work on the groups first music video for their at the time single Adult Life. We immediately clicked, hatching ideas for a love-induced-nostalgia based music video. We shared over beers, and for my partner Michael Garcia, water. The wiser of men. We wrapped production within that month, and the video was released in June. Immediately after we began brainstorming for Maniacs.
"The song is generally about letting [other people's perceptions] drive you insane, so we had to work with that. Then we came up with the idea to play organized criminals in the video," the band explains. "We combined those two ideas to form the plot and finished product. We can't give away the plot but we can tell you that it involves lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and driving." -Lucky & Wild//Purevolume.com
Our initial idea had begun with a car, and we decided to let the car be the set for our story, and more specifically the backseat the stage. The animal masks had made an appearance in the Adult Life video, and seem to be developing a bit of iconography although having different meanings in each story. Here, they are literally masks to conceal an identity but in turn still reveal more about the creatures within; a lion and a rat. Unlikely duo but based on basic intuition we can create identities for these two, especially when a gun is revealed.
*As a discretion, I'd like to make a quick statement here. In film, or at least the film I love, there is nothing done without direction, meaning: everything has purpose deeper than visual aesthetic. I think a lot of amateur filmmakers have abandoned this idea and consequently desensitized our ability to recognize an actual idea, or meaning in most of the work we see. Cinematography is a language.
Onward.
With that established, I can say that we wanted to pack this video dense in symbolism, but in a subtle way by rubber banding simple elements from Shakespearean tragedies, to greek mythology, to basic visual effects used in old film like projecting video of a road behind the car to simulate the sense of motion, but not hyper realistically. We wanted this initial sense that you were on a movie set, watching a story unfold; we wanted there to be zero sense of reality by playing with these different planes of existence: movie set to acting to story to finally real life at the end. It's a journey I think we all take when watching and it's hardly noticeable until brought up.
In layman's terms this is a story of death, and betrayal; remorse and realization. Our protagonist driving doesn't understand what's happening, he's confused and lost more in character the further he drives. He only acknowledges the woman without realizing that she is death; his death.
I feel it's still important for me to not break down every element of my work, like an illusionist I enjoy the reaction to tricks. That's not to say I won't answer questions involving the ideas or production behind any of my work so please, ask away!
Maniacs has been the most exciting project I've had the pleasure to co-direct with Michael Garcia, and it's safe to say that we are only on our way up to create more on an even grander scale.
Stay infected.
_Elinn
