Behind the scenes: Fat Cops - High Expectations
Having met the band and put together cool video for Plan of Attack, we were looking for something a little more involved for their next video ‘High Expectations’.
The lyrics suggest some sort of debauched narrative, but with four minutes of lyrics, it’s loose and unclear what the conclusion is. I knocked a few ideas back and forth with the band. We had agreement of involvement from Loki the rapper, who guested on the track.
We toyed with something set in the back of a taxi, and then a psychiatrist office. Eventually there was a suggestion of building a narrative for the video around a confession box. There was also a suggestion to close with a Laurel and Hardy style dance. That was about it really.
I started to piece together a narrative. Chris(the front man) would be in a confessional confessing to Loki(dressed as a priest). We’d then cut away to the various debauched events, and then at the end they would appear from the confessional and Loki would do his rap wearing grey jogging trousers -i.e. he was just a “normal” guy. I wanted the confessional to be somewhere unusual. I can’t remember if this was to try and overcome the need for having a church or whether I just liked the juxtaposition, but this ‘Elevator pitch’ gave us enough bits to start the planning.
The main obstacle to overcome was to work out where the confessional was coming from. Did it have to exist in situ? In which case, that was also our location for the dance at the end. Dancing in a church and using they confessional? I couldn't quite get my head round it. We were unlikely to get filming access to anything looking swanky on the cheap and anything we could get access to was ulikely to have much of a picturesque confessional.
I enquired about renting one. The transport alone made it unworkable.
I tried to work out if I could do it with green screens and overlays. Seemed pretty complicated and limiting.
I got a quote for building one from a carpenter friend. It was reasonable, but it changed the budget for the project considerably and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it afterwards. I liked the idea of droning away from the confessional and it catching fire. Possibly beside a caravan that contained a sex party…. Turns out I wasn’t to get my KLF moment an everyone involved including the caravan owner thought it was a bad idea.
So….. How do you film a confessional scene without a confessional.
Well if you haven’t seen the video it turned out like this:
I had already been worried about trying to film in an enclosed box without access to electricity. The ‘Hollywood’ Solution would be… don’t film in an enclosed box without access to electricity. Rachel pointed out that confessional grilles basically look like radiator covers. So I bought an MDF radiator cover on eBay and clamped it into a black and decker workbench:
A little bit of clever lighting and it is almost definitely my favourite workaround of all time.
So day 1 of the shoot became Chris and Loki in my living room with black out blinds lip-syncing and mime-rapping into an MDF radiator cover. The shots were minimal, but for wardrobe, I bought a cheap priest costume online:
For Chris, I thought it best to continue the theme of “bedraggled black tie” that we had used in the last video. I’m not quite sure of who the character he plays in the band or the songs are, but I quite like the little nod to the Blues Brothers and the “I’ve just come home from a night out” look kind of ties in with the bad cop thing. There’s logic in my brain somewhere for this.
The shoot went great. We had exactly what we needed, which just put more pressure on me for day 2 - the more complex caravan shoot. The only bit that wasn’t getting filmed at the caravan or in the vicinity was the “nightclub” scene.
I hate it when bands ask me to do a video and there’s a nightclub or bar scene. It happens more often than you would think and it’s always jut seen as a throwaway:
“then the band meander nonchalantly through the third floor of a busy super-club”
You will need….. bar staff, door staff, someone doing the lights…. and at least 20 other punters as extras. Seriously…. go and watch five videos by up and coming bands that were filmed on a low budget. Before long you’ll see a scene where the band are in a bar with the bass player awkwardly pouring a pint in a bar with three punters looking on awkwardly. You can smell the floor cleaner of the unused bar….. “we’ll just film it in my local…”… just rolls off the tongue. Reality is shite….
The lyric was:
“I’ve got a sordid weekend planned with a woman and a man that I met in a club after drinking”
So far I’ve managed to stray away from sex scenes, and “sordid weekend” works better in the mind than as a visual, but I saw the opportunity to have Chris enter a club and then exit it hours later after “left open to your imagination” occurred. I reckoned I could pull it off if I found the right alley way. I used an SPT utility cupboard beside Kelvinbridge:
It had graffiti and it is under a bridge. It looks like the wrong side of the tracks, but that couldn't be further from the truth, it’s nestled in “Glasgow’s leafy west end” where the house prices are some of the highest in the country and it is next to a particularly artisan coffee shop(which I can’t recommend enough). Most importantly it was 5 mins walk from my house.
So I got Chris to walk to the doorway, make himself disheveled, and then walk back. Some colour grading to get rid of the mid day sun and wee neon sign in post and the job of our first debauched cutaway was done:
I proposed ‘Sinners’ as the name of the club in the storyboard to tie in with the confession box theme. I wondered about trying to go for something more subtle, but I didn’t come up with anything.
The guts of the video were filmed and were looking good. Day two had more moving parts. It was outside. The talent had to travel to Ayrshire where Kenneth knew someone with a suitable caravan, so we were juggling dates and even though it was July we had fingers crossed for usable weather.
The narrative for video now was:
Chris buys ‘A quarter’ for a fiver.
He goes to a club and meets a couple
He agrees to meet them in a caravan for a ‘Sordid weekend’
Loki the priest comes out the caravan to reveal that he is in the caravan, where he is doing confessions for a fiver
Chris walks off into the sunset(or in actuality a field of cows)
The lyrics are in an order that if we follow them we end up with a kind of Tarantino-esque non-linear narrative. It wasn’t planned in some genius lightbulb moment, it just kind of fell into place and was the most sensible way of doing it. The quarter and the confession both cost a fiver. The confession and the sordid weekend may or may not be the same thing. What Chris and Loki got up to in the caravan with the soup ladle is left up to the imagination of the viewer.
I loved it. You could attach all sorts of meaning to it and equate the drugs to the religion etc. Lyrically Chris is eventually the victim and the perpetrator as he becomes the devil within in the last verse, so it goes around and eats it’s own tail.
So the Ayrshire weather gods shone upon us and we all met in the middle of nowhere like we were planning a sordid weekend in a caravan. Kenneth had made a “confessions £5” sign for the reveal. The location was perfect. While there were “proper” caravans round the corner, this one was surrounded by rusty scaffolding, car parts and disused building materials.
We filmed the guys lip-syncing such that we had enough material and then tried to do a drone shot for the final shot. It was too much. I had visions of droning over the Ayrshire hills and pretending it was Aberfan, but the shot wasn’t working, so I had Chris walk away on a wide shot and Loki headed back into the caravan for his next customer/victim.
We signed Loki off for the day and did our last remaining shots. Chris needed to “buy a quarter from his next door neighbour’s daughter”. We toyed with the idea of using a kid. It complicated things and limited our access to “sordid weekends”. It also added an extra moving part of making sure we could film when the school’s weren’t in. I had planned to film a drug deal in a small Ayrshire mining village and then drone over the village - guessing that it looked much like Aberfan in Wales. The whole thing was starting to become a bit too close to the reality of small Ayrshire mining villages, so we decided that the whole transaction could take place at a letterbox at a normal residential address. This made Chris’ debauched weekend even more out of place.
We couldn’t quite decide what to make “a quarter” look like. We wrapped an oxo cube in cling film. We tried to find a suitable trinket box. Nothing really worked. So we used a green lego brick which we could then replace in post. We replaced it with a glowing sun animation and then made it the only colour in the scene. This gave the drugs a magical element which added to our cyclical narrative. It was also a further nod to Tarantino with a ‘non specific glowing prize” which may or may not contain Marsellus Wallace’ soul. This further points to Chris as some sort of puppetmaster/devil character. Maybe the purchase of the soul happens last and is the final moment which ties off the whole narrative…..
I didn't want to open cold with the confession, and I couldn’t have a way of Chris entering a confessional as it would spoil the reveal of the caravan. To overcome this I toyed with the idea of having him walk along the street in “Aberfan”, but with only 4 bars before Loki starts and needs to be in the confession box, I opted for a “hero shot” to combine the introduction of Chris with the titles. I read somewhere that the hero shot is clockwise for hero’s and anti-clockwise for villains. (Also of note - Hero’s on film advance into battle left to right and villains do the opposite). In case this over analysis of film meant anything, I presented Chris in clockwise and then anti-clockwise to suggest duality in his character :)
I usually steer clear from narrative videos and this is basically why. It’s very difficult to create a narrative that’s creative that can be relayed in 4 minutes without it being shoehorned in. This video is an exception. I’m over the moon with how it turned out. There was so much space for things going wrong, but everyone played their roles and it was a real team effort to get it to the finished line.
I still have the radiator cover in my cellar. I don’t have the heart to chuck it out.
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