Behind the scenes: Fat Cops - Plan of Attack

Through Last Night From Glasgow, I got approached to make a video for Fat cops. They are an interesting band. A quick google showed me that the band was put together from a variety of people in a variety of places who had all been arguing on twitter. It’s nothing if not original. Each member has a successful career in their own right and the band was a collective itch that there was a need to scratch. 

There’s a definite 90’s feel to the band - this is evidenced by their tour support for the Happy Mondays. Wonderfully fallible as they are, I’ve always loved the Happy Mondays. 

Photo not by me - it’s by Duncan McGlynn

We were told there were two singles in the pipeline, but I was only to do one video(High Expectations). Or two if we could make the first one(Plan of Attack) pretty cheap. 

Never one to resist a challenge, we had a look at their previous video:

Video not by me - It’s by Iain Robertson

The initial discussions for ‘High Expectations’ were looking like it was going to be shot around streets with the band members on location similar to the first video. In order to provide a bit of a buffer between that and their first video, we decided a “wee cheapie” might be a good option to split things up a little. 

With it being 2021, I had a zoom with Chris and Bobby from the band. A great band for name dropping, Bobby is in the Bluebells. We were reading from the same hymn sheet. The plan of attack for ‘Plan of Attack’ was to do a simple green screen video. The band suggested something like this:

A dab hand at a bit of green screen, it seemed like a good plan while we put together ideas for ‘High Expectations’. I’d film Chris miming on the greenscreen and then put some stock footage behind it:

After that it was just a case of sticking some stock footage in the background and then stick on a few overlays. There wasn’t much plan beyond that. One of us suggested making it look like old telly footage. There was a rough idea of “dancing girls”.

I mocked up a rough edit with some Creative Commons government information films in the background. these had a kind of loose relation to the lyrical content. We gradually developed the rough idea of having the video gradually move through the history of Television; black and white and then VHS scan lines etc.

One of the band members was quite Marvel obsessed, so this gave way to the idea of leaning on a few of the themes from Wandavision:

This really floated our boat, but we also had to remind ourselves that this was meant to be the “wee cheapie”. We stole the “tuning” intro from Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ - whether the youth of today remember that you had to tune radio’s(never mind tellies) we’ll just ignore.

We love a font, so we put together some titles that “borrowed” some themes from Wandavision. These were themes that they had already borrowed from ‘I love Lucy’ and ‘Bewitched’:

After that, it was just a case of polishing and improving. Considering it was a ‘wee cheapie’, we were pretty pleased with it. We’d managed to touch base with all sorts of elements of popular culture, memories of old tellies and even had a hint to some super heroes. Can’t ask much better than that:

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