Making the “Alone” Video
Posted by Matt
Back in April when it was warm, John and I got word that filmmaker Phil Harder had come to see one of our first gigs. John and I had known of Phil way back in the 80’s when he had shot about 200 music videos of various scruffy bands in and out of Minneapolis, all in the 16 MM format. I remember thinking that the work was raw and fresh, and Phil was amazingly prolific. As the bands that Phil had shot became more successful, they brought Phil along, exposing his talent to ever-higher budgets and ever-huger stars. If you look at his resume, the famous names go on and on.
Recently, Phil had become neighbors in Minneapolis with our keyboard player, Dave Salmela. Dave is kind of a quiet phenomenon. The opposite of pushy, Dave never asks for anything. But somehow, he always ends up in the middle of the action. Wherever there is art or music being made, Dave is always standing there with a key role. His curiosity and his easy nature draws creative people toward him. That’s how The Twilight Hours crossed into Phil’s orbit. He offered to shoot a video for one of our songs.
Music videos. We all embrace and accept them, but what an odd form. Fantastical imagery is generated, vaguely related to the lyrics of the song. Budgets are limited so the band always has to commit in advance to the insane imagery suggested by the the director. Then, after all the ridiculous footage has been captured at great expense, you just have to pray that the pictures and the music really do connect and make sense in some sort of dream logic.
Now Phil had his own motivation in making this video, but his selfish reason only makes about as much sense as the dream imagery you’d see in any video. Here was what Phil needed out of the project: Phil had a rickety little house boat sitting down on the turbid banks of the Mississippi River. And due to some art installation that Phil and Dave had created, the walls on the inside of this boat happened to be covered with mirrors and shiny plastic materials. So, to Phil, the insatiable musical film maker, the situation in his boat amounted to a kind of cosmic obligation to shoot as many music videos in this mirrored room as he could before he had to tear down all these mirrors and put up some other weird props in there.
The Twilight Hours were just lucky enough to come across Phil’s radar as he was undergoing this mania to shot videos in his mirror-walled houseboat. I think he ended up shooting about six different bands in there.
We gave Phil a CD of our soon to be released album, “Stereo Night” so he could see if there was a song that inspired him. We kind of expected him to pick out something that would be upbeat and “hit”-ish. But he surprised us and said that he thought that one of the slower songs, Alone, would make sense in that mirrored environment. Immediately, we saw the poetical logic of that choice: the lonesome lyrics set against the infinite reflections of a mirrored chamber. This surprising song suggestion by Phil got things off to a fine start because it was an inspired leap. It made us want to follow.
I sent John and Phil an email telling them that I thought that the lonliest image I had ever seen in movies was the image in “2001: A Space Odyssey” of the astronaut Dave spinning away from his ship, voiceless, helpless and utterly alone. This suggestion triggered a flurry of ideas from John and Phil. In a way, the mirrored room looked like the interior of a 60’s TV space capsule. But even better, Phil and his filmmaking partner Rick Fuller had gathered a treasure trove of public domain NASA film footage from the early space flights which we could use in our little movie. Phil became excited about the notion of projecting these old clips onto and our faces and instruments as we lip synced to the song. Way back in the 80’s, John and my first album together, “Applehead Man” used that very sort of projection process on its cover. We love that look. Phil proposed to capture everything on his dinged-up 16 MM camera. We would have grainy film within grainy film, a recipe for beauty.
Predictably, once we got into that hot, cramped boat, things just turned into a marathon under lights. Phil was crawling around on on the revolting shag floor pointing his camera and quietly commanding us into various positions and configurations. Film loops were strung from the floor to the ceiling and projected from two old projectors like the ones John and I used to see during film hour in our 6th grade classes. Sometimes the music would be playing at double speed, making the “sync” part of lip-syncing kind of a joke. And at all times the muffled music would be playing from a barky little boom box through the thin wall of the boat’s cabin. The situation was not plush. We’d shoot for a while and then open the doors to cool off in the dank river air. At one point, as we broke for a quick dinner, Phil became agitated by the changing light of dusk. Dinner went by the way side and in a big hurry we shot the profiled footage we see in the second verse with the river shimmering in the background. All this hanging out on the boat and that’s the only water you end up seeing!
Phil brought all the right elements into play. The great old NASA footage. The corny mirrored room. The awesome grainy, slowed-down film format that he loves. And all that unabashed childishness that he possesses in spades. I truly hope that in the years ahead I can remain as childish and id-driven as Phil is now.
Thank you, Phil!
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