Keep Your Wits Sharp – Director Matt Bigland, Co-Director/Producer Matt Maude
Hello, my name is Matthew Maude. I’m a music video director and documentary producer from Halifax, UK. I will be gracing you with my day in the life of a certain Saturday in March 2007. I’m writing about producing and directing a music video for a band from Leeds, a city in the north of England.
Saturday March 24th, 2007. 5AM
I lift my eyes to the pain of my ears. There’s something loud in my room, something very loud and ominously dangerous that lies vibrating and screaming in the sullen darkness of my bedroom. I’m pretty much naked, but for some reason, I’ve got on sock on my left foot. I search in my memory banks and await the side-splitting sensation of a hangover. After a moment, nothing comes.
Then from somewhere, my brain responds, clicks cells together like Dorothy’s heels and recognizes the sound as the alarm clock. As I motion my hand to the fucking bastard sound, I see that it’s no later than five in the morning and some prankster has set it this early. The sound dies and so does the majority of my body as I realize it was me that had set it. I need to get up this early, we start shooting at eight AM
After I ram my face with breakfast cereal I attempt to get contact lenses in my eyes. It’s too early for contact lens, but for what I’m supposed to do over the next 48 hours I’m going to need total vision. Working on a film set demands and depends on it. But today I can’t seem to meet the right contact lens to my right eye. Not only because my eyes won’t open fully in the harsh light of the small bathroom of my Leeds flat, but because my fingers still have the remnants of last night’s dinner—chilies from a curry—on them and the placement of the small circles into my eyes is leading to increasingly dramatic and horrific pain.
It hasn’t been the best start to the day.
***
For the past 2 months I have been working as the producer on a music video for a band called Mother Vulpine. A four piece from Leeds, the band’s edgy rock, disco-inflamed peaking instrumental sections are caught between brilliant-yet-haunting-and-threatening lyrics; each song with dark content and violent undertones seems in every way a contradiction to the easygoing, fun loving, warm and humbling friendships I’ve had and come into contact with every member of the band.
I’ve known Matt Bigland, the lead singer, since I was nine. He’s been my best friend for the majority of my life. He is also one of the most talented musicians I’m ever likely to meet and one of the best people I’m ever likely to spend time with. I grew up with Lindsay Wilson, the guitarist. As she has two sisters and I two brothers, it seemed almost destined by fate that our families would spend so much time together. My brother and Lindsay had once upon a time dated. Her present boyfriend is bassist Tom Hudson. I’ve made videos with him before, and he can make me laugh until I excrete bodily fluids—usually piss or spit. Each of them I have shared too many birthdays with, incited too many hangovers or Frisbee sessions with. And Ben ‘Shakey’ Waddleton, the drummer, I’ve played poker with for the past couple of years. He’s a nice enough chap too.
Having made music videos before, I considered myself a part of the video-making team as soon as I heard that they were releasing a single. In fact, I charged at them like a crazy person and demanded to be part of the process.
January 2007
I knew I wasn’t going to direct, Matt himself had already fallen into the role while writing and creating the concept, but I knew that for the video to work, he was going to need help. Crew, cast and lots and lots of contacts. And money. And I hoped that I could be that bit of help needed to make a brilliant idea become a brilliant reality.
You see, that’s the challenging part of the music video process. Making the idea a reality.
When we listen to songs, subconsciously or consciously, we imagine an image in our head. Be it a moment in our lives when the song took a strong reverence and relevance, or a memory of an emotion. A break-up, a death, or that moment a song took you alive, struck you like lightning and enlightened you to the fact that you were now in love, but hadn't yet realized it.
Taking that image and making it a reality is the most difficult part of the process. We can all imagine that best music video in our heads—a police dog pursuing a cat burglar, two clouds falling in love or thousands of other ideas, millions of other plotlines that would perfectly encapsulate a song. However, taking that imagery into reality is a different thing, making it real on film is the hardest part of the process. And it’s what separates the easy dreamer and the realist filmmaker.
In Matt’s head and his storyboards we had a chase scene: a blood-thirsty and vicious wolf chases a fat, bald medieval butcher across a deathly landscape of a dense and haunting forest, culminating in the demise of the butcher at the hands of the band, subtly representing the paws of the wolf.
So how the hell do we make this a reality? Firstly, we need a huge fat man. Not easy to come by, especially when you can’t really advertise and ask for a huge fat man to come by and stop by for an audition. And if you thought that was hard, where the hell do you get a wolf? At that, a professional trained wolf? Then how do you get a camera moving at light speed to stay with the wolf as it rushes itself headlong in pursuit of the jiggling fleshy mush of the butcher? All this and in a dense forest that disallows all of the above, not to mention all the light needed to film?
It’s enough to give anyone a tumor and it’s been my cancer to deal with.
January becomes February quickly and I’m suddenly thrust very sharply into the Vulpine video. Somehow Lindsay has managed to book a wolf for the shoot. Lindsay and Matt drive to Manchester to meet Poke the wolf dog. He looks every inch perfect, apart from the fact that he looks a little too cute to be considered murderous. Hopefully, he won’t be a little adverse to make up. His trainer though, Wayne, seems an absolute psycho. Hard to talk to, abrasive and incurably arrogant, he’s just what we need. A fluffy dog and a potential dangerous dog handler.
In addition, Lindsay has found the fat man. Chris Farley (seriously), is a mechanic and security guard and although he lives some 300 miles south of Leeds he’s offered his services for free. He looks perfect for the part, right down to every detail of our specifications. The only problem, he’s never acted before.
A wolf that is too cute. A trainer that’s violent to deal with. And an actor who’s never acted.
Chaos.
Then out of nowhere, the Vulp’s are offered a chance to tour the UK with the Eagles of Death Metal. It’s a big deal and there’s no questions asked. The band’s priorities shift overnight and they're off onto big venues to play big gigs over the next two weeks. Suddenly amongst the evaporating priorities, the video becomes all mine to sort.
The wolf and actor sorted, I start to look at the mammoth list that we need to sort. Thankfully I’m not alone. Aurora Fearnley, my production co-ordinator and all-too-often go-to-girl is ready on standby and on hand to help. Kate, my girlfriend somehow manages to call on her reserves of understanding to not only help, but also interact with me with a sense of compassion and care that no human being should be able to offer another human being rationally.
Amongst the many things to sort, our mine tasks are these:
a) Finding a crew
b) Finding a forest and a decent location
c) Working out how to shoot the idea
d) Finding money for the project
a) We build together a crew that I’ve worked with before and with others that Aurora recommends. With the wealth and depth of Aurora’s experience, I book them instantly. Suddenly we’ve got two Directors of Photographyin the likes of Adam Conlon and Rob Gardner on board, both of whom also have vast experience as camera operators. We get hold of Mike ‘Moon’ Marriage to operate the vital stedicam needed to shoot complicated set-ups included in the wolf portions. And slowly but surely we begin to fill out the other parts needed—production assistants, drivers and various helpers.
All this takes us up to the day the shoot takes place. A month to bring together a crew of less than 15. The final pieces coming into place the morning of the shoot, when I manage, somehow, to bring a quad bike driver into the forest to allow the stedicam to track the raging wolf as it runs furiously (I hope) towards the camera.
b) Finding the right forest includes searches across 4 different counties (your equivalent of our counties is your states). Finding the right density of forest in the treetops BUT without the foliage on the ground that would prevent movement is hard to find. Finding one that is on even ground and flat is more than difficult. And finding one that is nearby is nigh on impossible. Three weeks before the shoot date, I find it, right on my doorstep, in a forest that I use to walk in when I was child. The Otley Chevin becomes our 1600s haunted forest overnight.
c) Matt's vision calls for a section that is shot entirely in slow motion. And not just any slow motion. The kind that documents the spiraling wind vortex of a speeding bullet, the slow and effortless detail of a single raindrop in a storm. The kind that evokes every kind of beautiful your eye never sees. All this and shooting the rest of the film in standard speed. We try and research every possibility. Film is too expensive considering it’s looking more and more likely that our search for d) any sort of funding is not going to work. Slowing down normal video, even HD, won’t give the quality that the idea demands. And every other option, including filming on the elusive and wonderful Phantom camera (capable of filming at 100,000 frames per second) is going to cost all of our kidneys combined. Even for a rental for just one day.
Then luck strikes. One of my students at the local Film university has worked with a slow motion camera before, recommends the hirer and gives us his contact details. 400 pounds later, Mark Johnson of Slow Mo comes on board and his Ultima Proton camera (capable of 150,000 frames per second) is ours for the making.
d) There’s no money. And there’s no way that some kind soul is going to give us any when there are starving children in the world. Nor would we expect it. But that still leaves us penniless. Normally we’d have the support of the uber-rich record label to throw dollar at us, but because Vulpine are signed onto an independent with a marketing budget normally reserved for a meal at McDonalds, it’s become alarming clear that money isn’t going to be part of this idea.
As much as any director says that you don’t need money to make a good video, you do. Most of these directors have the luxury of university facilities to work with, or their own kit to shoot on. But if you’ve got a great idea, more than often, it’s a little bit of money that will make the difference between the good and great video.
Matt and I sit across from each other at the coffee table of his Leeds lounge. He’s tired, back from the tour and drooling for some rest. I’m knackered, white as sheet from lack of sleep and ready to fall dead on the floor if someone was close enough to utter the last rites. Only commitment, nothing else, keeps our eyes from sleep.
As we sip on our sugary tea (and I don’t put sugar in the tea, but I needed the energy bad) we shake our hands together and sign off 1000 pounds from each of our bank accounts. Suddenly we, the director and producer, have just put 2000 pounds behind the idea and thus, we have a budget. Thus, we have become the executive producers to the same project we are directing and producing. To put it into scale, we’ve just put 4000 dollars of our own money into a video. 4000 dollars that neither of us have.
Never, ever do this. It’s very bad practice. I can assure you, that you will never make any money from this industry if you continue to do so.
In the last week leading up to the shoot, Matt and I don’t spend more than six hours apart from one another. With photocopies of the storyboards strung about my lounge floor and walls, the whole house is turned into a production company devoted purely to this video endeavor. My housemates are all but banned from entering the house as not to disturb the process and it becomes evidently clear that I will have to repay them at some point with either sexual favors or a dinner at a restaurant of their choice.
Within the week, Matt and I journey every day to the location, we research our shooting angles and setups, we block our shots and wall off our locations to members of the public. We try to do everything we can do before shooting starts. We sort out the last details of the shoot. Somehow, even with the little time we have to sleep, we even manage get out to the supermarket to get enough for food for everyone for the entire weekend.
We know we don’t have enough time or money to get this idea onto a finished film—we need twice as much time and four times as much money. We both know that we’ll need a miracle to get through the next two days. Neither of us says it though, we both know it’ll do us no good.
Friday night, the night before the shoot, we go to Tesco’s, our local supermarket, buy the best food I can cook, and feast. Matt walks home at two in the morning, I run up to bed, set the alarm clock for five, kick off my shoes and one sock and fall asleep as fast I ever done before.
Saturday 11AM
Matt has never directed a music video before. Nor directed any kind of video before. It illustrates, I hope, how much faith and hope and I and the entire band have in him. I wanted to help him as much as I could and be there as much as professional help as a friend. But now it’s 11AM and we’re still at the first location, a scene we should have moved on from two hours before. This is bad, very bad.
We’re drastically behind and Aurora is tugging at my coattails, telling me to sort it out and get something done. Everyone else is oblivious, swanning around like perfectionist over each shot, ramming eight or nine takes behind each setup, they don’t know how much else we need to get done over the next two days. I pull Matt aside.
“Hey buddy. I’m splitting the crew into two; we’re too far behind. At the moment dude, we’re going to have seven seconds of a five minute video. We need to pick up the pace a little.”
At that, I’m off and careering around the corner to the second location. There I meet Mark, the slow mo guy and get him and his camera setup. My quad bike guy is here and ready to go. I prep the shots I’m taking over and try gather the wits to direct when I had no intention of doing so. I thought, largely my job was done. Get everyone there. Get everything you need to make this shoot work. It’ll work itself out.
I was wrong.
Thirty minutes later, Matt is at our location. He’s on slow-mo and I’m on real time. I take Adam as my DP and Matt has Rob and then we split our crew down the middle.
1PM
We haven’t broken for lunch yet and we probably won’t until dinner. I put the order in to get sandwiches made off-site and out of sight to be brought as some sort of working lunch picnic—there just isn’t time to stop for half an hour.
So much of making music videos is going with the flow. If a light bulb blows up in your face you ditch it in favor of sunlight and claim you were going for a natural look. When your camera breaks down you grab your cell phone and start asking every favor you can. If your actor has never acted before you make do with what you’ve got. It’s part and parcel of the independent film scene—and in music videos, away from the big budgets, your buzz word is independent. It lets you get away with murder when you’re murdering your ideas. The perfect day is when nothing goes wrong, when all your ideas come together and you’re being true to every of your intentions. When it all goes perfectly, it’s the best feeling in the world. But God didn’t make perfection, he made us. Evolution keeps on going, we haven’t finished yet and as a result, we humans fuck it up. So more than often, film shoots can go wrong. Sometimes badly.
I hate it but I’m rushing everything. I’m aware that I’ve got a huge list of shots to get through, every one of my setups include two or three takes before I’m off to set the next one up and I’m putting shots in the can that aren’t entirely perfect With the clock we’re battling, it's war, and you can’t have perfection in war.
I realize as I’m rehearsing one shot—I’m chasing after a quad bike with a camera attached to it, in deep forest, pretending to be a wolf—that I'm not doing too badly.
Twenty minutes later, I’ve just nailed a shot of the wolf charging after the camera, a shot I’ve been worrying about since I saw it materialize on Matt’s storyboards two months ago. The wolf is released at just the right time, the quad bike is moving at the right speed, the camera gets just enough steadiness for the shot, we have five seconds worth of video that will stun audiences. We move on.
All this and I’m still battling with the trainer, Wayne.
It’s said you never work with children or animals on TV. What’s never mentioned within this saying is that it’s neither the children or the animals that are the problem. It’s the parents and the trainers who are the absolute bastards to work with.
This is particularly true of Wayne.
The first time I see Wayne, he’s exactly how I’d picture him. Gruff, late 40’s, smoking constantly, his whole persona, from flannels to face, are wrinkled, lined with grit and determination. He looks like he’s seen too much in life.
I honestly believe that Wayne doesn’t know what he’s doing. There’s very little I know about dog training, but I understand that dogs can learn basic instructions such as ‘COME’ and ‘SIT’ and well, come and sit, that’s all I need. Poke the wolf is an excitable dog, a big dog, but a dog nonetheless. Wayne really struggles with Poke, struggles to get him run in the right direction or run at all. I’m being a little harsh, but only a little. It’s insane working with a trained dog who won’t listen to even basic instructions.
We disagree about everything. As Wayne has worked with animal actors for most of his working life, he knows things I shouldn’t, so he instantly disagrees with the wolf-chasing-after-quad shots. They won’t work he tells me, adamant to the point of ignorance.
“Can we try?” I ask.
“Sure, but you’ll be wasting your time.”
After it works, Wayne attempts to establish authority when we search through the woods for our next location.
“This will work” Wayne tells everyone, forgetting I think, that he’s not directing the scene.
“It won’t Wayne, the track is too bumpy and there’s not enough room for the quad bike to get through.”
He responds with silence, but his eyes speak fire into my soul.
I find the right track – wide, open, flat and surrounded by dense forest. It’s perfect for the shots I need.
“This is it guys, let’s get it setup. Bring in the quad and camera.”
“This won’t work,” he says.
“Why not, Wayne?”
“Because it won’t.”
“It’s perfect Wayne, we’ll do it here.”
And that’s when the explosion happens. That’s when Wayne’s bitterness comes to a head, when all of the anger rises to boiling point and shatters the glass that’s contained it for so long.
“Don’t you fucking talk to me like that you little shit!” He's screaming. “What the fuck do you know about filmmaking?! I’ve directed more films that you’ve even seen! Don’t you tell me what we are going to do. You work with animals do you? Do you know how to move my animal do you? Do you want to do it? I’ll pack them up and drive off you shit.”
He collects himself a bit.
“Now let’s get over to the location I saw. This won’t work. The one I saw will.”
[I don’t quite remember what happened directly after this outburst, or where we filmed the next sequences. While Wayne ranted and spat into my face, I imagined several different ways I could make him shut up, High Fidelity style. I know for a fact that we used the location I wanted to because it appeared in the edit and then the finished film, but I can’t for the life of me remember how it came to be there. No clue as to how I talked Wayne into the location and brought order back to the set. I just know it happened. All I remember was the heat forming in my head, sensing the eyes of my crew on Wayne and I as he sought to destroy me. ]
I breathe in, take the beating and then agree with him. I’ve been enough on film sets to meet and know divas when I see them. I let his anger seep out and agree with him. The words that are there to agree with feel like bile on my tongue. I am rage, my anger is rising and I'm ready to punch Wayne through his face. I don’t. I internalize and promise myself that before the day is over, Wayne will know this fury.
We finish our shots and I dismiss Wayne and the wolf for Matt’s slow motion shots. I walk back to the crew and laugh it off. Thankfully there’s a lot of laughter to go around.
4PM
We’ve just finished our quad shots with Chris Farley, our actor and scared-for-his-life butcher. We’ve done well; we’ve managed to get all the shots of Chris moving at some speed through the forest. There’s enough to fill out a good 30 seconds of the video there, shots essential to build the tension and context of the piece.
I’m still a little disappointed with them though, either because Chris has never acted before, or because I didn’t push him enough, but he doesn’t look scared enough in his motion. It’s not until the next day that I realize Chris can’t really look scared, or doesn’t know how to. A bouncer most of his life, Chris, is just too tough to know what really looking scared is like. Fast forward a month though and in the context of the final edit, the shots look brilliant, as if the butcher is somehow creating this chase within his head. The slight disappointment turns into intense delight.
6PM
The light has faded fast. We’ve turned the two crews back into one and we’re attempting somewhat desperately to get the final shot of the video. In it, Chris is running towards the camera with the wolf hot on his heels. At the last moment, our butcher trips, falling to his doom in the thick mud below, and behind him we see the wolf charging towards his fall.
Or that’s what the storyboard shows. The reality is a lot harder to imagine. It involves perfect timing, between a camera, cast member and dog. Machine, man and animal. And you can’t achieve what you want when one of your main participants doesn’t speak English or any human language and doesn’t know what action means. We manage one take where it all seems to work, all the timing comes together in sync, but honestly, it looks tired, mainly because everyone is. Poke looks slow and cute. Chris looks pathetic in his trip, not exhausted or resigned to his fate of death. He looks like he’s taken a tumble as if he’s a toddler. But there’s not enough time, and neither of the DP's think there’s a point to shooting in this light. I have to agree with them. There’s just not enough time.
I call it, pack the gear, let’s get back.
In my head I work how much we’ve got to do tomorrow and it’s a lot. Later that night, we work out we’ve got exactly the same amount to do on Sunday as we completed on Saturday. Somehow we manage to get all the shots we need to do. It’s a miracle.
Wayne and the wolf aren’t around tomorrow though, so with my anger nicely marinated after 4 hours, I step up to his Jeep and give him a piece of my mind.
“Do you know what a director does Wayne? He directs! Do you know what piece you are in this puzzle? You’re not the fucking director. You’re the dog handler, you handle the fucking animal. So if I say this location works, I ask you if it’s safe enough for your animal and it if it’s, that’s it. Apart from that, you haven’t got an opinion. Don’t you ever talk to me or anyone like you did on my film set today. Don’t ever cross a director like that again. You have something to say, you take them aside for a moment, not shout and scream like some spoiled child. You’re lucky to get paid after a stunt like that.
Within earshot, a documentary crew who has been filming Wayne all day as part of documentary on animals in film overhears this conversation. I’m aware the cameras are off, but Wayne still needs to keep his cool. He can’t lash back and I know it. I tell him where to truly stick it. For the whole day he’s been telling this documentary crew he’s God and he knows everything, that he’s well liked and part of the team. And I make it plainly clear that he’s none of the above. Wayne is a prick
I stroke Poke goodbye, tussle his fur behind his ears and look at Wayne one last time. I won’t cross his path again
When I finally get off sleep, I set the alarm clock for four the next morning. There’s lot to do tomorrow. I hope the adrenaline sticks with me until Monday morning.
Four weeks later, we have this video. We hope you like it:
For more information, visit www.myspace.com/mothervulpine or onthebonerecords.com.
Watch The Making of "Keep Your Wits Sharp (Her Words Are Quick)"
