June 2000 OPM shoot day Vasquez Rocks

8AM

I have to test out the harness rig the arm of which stands a good thirty feet above the sandy rocks, the wires hanging down to a corset harness designed to suspend a human off the ground with the minimum of bulk and the maximum of pain.

We have to test the harness to make sure the camera is in the right place. We strap up Jamaal – a particularly useless and annoying PA, Jamaal, in his hideously expensive looking shirts, had spent all of the previous week tactfully avoiding work while presenting us with his “I’m here and ready for work” face.

Up goes Jamaal, high up in the air, swinging with his balls pressed up his arse by precisely the force of his own body weight.

Part of the test is to see how long before the pain of having your balls forced up your arse becomes unbearable  - pretty soon Jamaal is stuttering “C’mon guys the pain is pretty bad now…”

“Pretty bad, but not unbearable?”

“C’mon guys its pretty bad”

“Hoist him a little higher and let’s change the lens..”

Later that evening

We are running against the clock and Producer Youree has signed a contract that means if we shoot past midnight he goes to jail„ I am genuinely puzzled as to why he did that, he must know that I would take pleasure in sending a producer to jail.

I am operating one Arri 435 with a thirty five mm lens  - The commissioner, Sharon Robertson of Atlantic has been requesting a party atmosphere all day – now we have thirty or so of the bands friends who have turned up off their own backs. They are drunk, drugged up, fighting and seem to be genuinely having a party.

I hear a faint tapping sound and look down at a huge insect thrashing around on a camera box nearby, then look up at the giant overhead Musco light.

Here in the Vasquez desert there are tons of insect lives, most of that have come alive at midnight to launch a suicide attack on our bank of lights. There must be a million insects in the sky, making the night dense with front-lit white and zigzagging  fractal patterns. The sight is staggering.

The first shot in this set-up is the various members of the band floating down to earth in front of a burnt out car wreck and a mob of people after drifting through the rest of the video like lost souls in the sky.

The track comes on over the playback speakers, I turn over the camera and in front of the lens all hell breaks loose. People punching each other, breaking the car headlights with their skateboards – smashing the windows, beating its roof in with their trucks – there is a hilariously high violence quota.

We cut the shot and I’m laughing my head off – Sharon is paralysed, her face a mask of abject horror, she says she is uncomfortable with the level of violence. I explain how the bashing of skateboards by the trucks on a hard surface is a traditional skate sign of appreciation. She is having none of it.

We send in Anthony Dimino, esteemed 1^st assistant director known as Pete Clemenza for his Italian American descent and his ability to arrange what ever  is needed. Clemenza has quite word and we continue shooting.

The playback comes on and the action resumes, with exactly the same violence quota as the last take, everyone is giving the camera the finger, the band feed off the energy of the crowd. They leap around all over the place. A kid breaks a skateboard over his head, but we don’t catch it on camera . Then the same kid leaps onto the rusty gnarled scrap car and cuts face, not badly but there seems to be a lot of blood, I wonder if he signed a waiver. The shoot has turned into what the esteemed Clemenza would refer to as a ‘Pigfuck’.

I hate this guerrilla style shooting, but I battle through it, working against the clock picking the camera up, throwing it down, rolling, picking it up throwing it down…. We cut the last shot and Clemenza, comes over to me and asks if he can call a wrap – I look at him wearily and mouth the words “put me out of my misery”.

Written June 2000 © David Aldrin Slade

First Published in Promo Magazine July 2000

To see the video on go here:

http://www.mtv.com/videos/opm/9556/heaven-is-a-halfpipe.jhtml

Postscript 2009

Not one of my favourite videos. I don’t think the band liked it much either, they were more slapstick fellows, and I was trying to create multi meaning narrative, and the label just wanted a party video. 

The skating was pretty lame because we couldn’t afford pro skaters and we only had one day to shoot, although if you look out you will see Wee Man doing a rail slide in one party shot.

All that said it was fun to shoot, we used Pan anamorphic lenses, Jo Willems shot it beautifully, Frank Voiturer graded it wonderfully and  the effects done largely by Sean Broughton at Smoke and Mirrors in London turned out amazing.

We had a whole slew of shots that where flickering due to a faulty ballast on two of the flicker free lights. Again all this footage, was saved by the genius of Sean Broughton who devised an algorithm to regrade the luminance of sections of the shot in a flicker that cancelled out the problem.

The song was a big hit all over the world and so this was probably one of my most played videos on MTV. Life is full of savage ironies.

Sadly this is one of a few videos that will leave a note of sadness within me as it was produced by the wonderful and sadly missed Barney Jeffrey who passed away on March 10th 2008.