We're ticking off the days until the MMVAs by profiling 2009's Video of the Year nominees.
Video: K-os, "4321"
Director: Drew Lightfoot (co-directed with K-os)
Notable Credits:
Constantines, “Hard Feelings”
In Flight Safety, “Coast is Clear”
K-os, “Sunday Morning”
The Raconteurs, “Broken Boy Soldier” (animation)
Video He Wishes He Directed: UNKLE f. Thom Yorke, "Rabbit in Your Headlights" (dir. Jonathan Glazer)
“It’s very unlike most of my work,” says Lightfoot of the 1999 video which he describes as “just really eerie and spooky.
“It had a really profound effect on me when I first saw it.”
The Video: It’s just another night shift for mall janitor K-os: mopping up the Zellers and the Dollarama, breaking out some stop-motion b-boy stances with pals, battling a ninja, bringing mannequins to life Today’s Special-style, whipping Matte Babel and Buck 65 at floor hockey. You know, the usual.
Where the Concept Came From: Considering Drew Lightfoot and K-os share directorial credit on “4321,” there was a certain amount of mind-melding going on when it came to conjuring up the video’s concept -– “usually in a bar,” says Lightfoot. But the video plot all started with a cast of characters proposed by K-os: a martial artist, a hockey player, etc. It was a pitch Lightfoot could roll with.
“It just seemed to me there were many styles within the song. Like his singing style changes and it kind of felt appropriate that he would become these different characters, like his music is bringing about this element of magic,” Lightfoot explains. “The whole idea was he [K-os] was this down and out character who doesn’t really have a great deal going on, but he has this incredibly vivid imagination and that’s his means to travel to these other places and be these characters he wouldn’t normally be in real life. I think we all have those inspirations in our lives. We all wish we could fly or be a hero for a day or or a hockey star.”
Biggest Splurge: “I would imagine the locations were not cheap,” guesses Lightfoot, who adds that time was really the greatest expense. The shoot was spread over two nights and two separate, musty Toronto shopping complexes, Dufferin Mall and Gerrard Square. For the most part, though, Lightfoot explains the video was shot on the cheap. They used the locations’ original lighting -- for that greenish, authentic mall feel -- and he says he didn’t even take a director’s fee out of the shoot’s $50,000 budget “because I wanted to get all the shots and I wanted to get all the toys that I needed.”
Biggest Challenge in Making the Video: With just two nights to get every shot -– plus film some key, stop-motion animation dance sequences, Lightfoot says “it really, really was a rushed process.” At any given time he was managing three or more different cameras set up around the mall. “So myself and a cinematographer, Andre Pienaar, were pretty much on the move all the time. Literally running from one part of the mall, setting up a shot, shooting it; between takes we’d run down to the other part of the mall, grab a few more takes.”
Lightfoot, however, loved the pressure. “The actual shoot was just an enormous amount of fun,” he says. “It’s just this incredible adrenaline rush when you’re running around and your mind’s moving a thousand miles a minute and you haven’t slept in awhile and you’re in a deserted mall in the middle of the night with all these other crew members who are equally delirious.”
Why He'll Always Remember This Shoot: The whole video has a staccato feel, and while some of that effect was captured by playing back the video at 12 frames per second, Lightfoot -- who’s an animator with credits including Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride and Fox TV series The PJ’s –- created some of the dance and movement sequences using traditional, stop-motion animation techniques. “Those were shot a single frame in a move, take a pose, move, take a pose.” Some rehearsal time with key talent kept things on track, plus it helped that some of the recruits –- K-os' pals Buck 65 and former MuchMusic VJ Matte Babel, who play his floor-hockey archnemeses -– were naturals. “Rich [Terfry, a.k.a. Buck 65] and Matte were very much into it. And Rich especially, he just really figured out the animation process,” says Lightfoot. “I could just see him picking it up very quickly and he was bringing things to the table on his own, which was great because I didn’t have to sort of ride around on everyone’s shoulders.”
But Lightfoot says the video’s dancers Lybido and Benzo –- who improvised most of their movements -- were particularly impressive. “Seeing them, like teaching them how to animate and then unleashing them with a camera and seeing what they came back with…”
“I think just working with the dancers and coming up with little moments of dance. That was probably the most exciting for me,” he says.
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