AirplayUK 03

Director Profile: Diamond Dogs

Phil: I’m Phil

Olly: I’m Olly and we’re the Diamond Dogs.

Phil: We make music videos.

Phil: I was working at a company called Blue Source which is a graphic design agency, and Olly was working doing…

Olly: …art directing and storyboarding

Phil: …and we kept feeding treatments to people saying “Can you read this? What do you think of it?” and eventually one of the scripts, they said “The label really love it, can you make it?” And then we did Aloud.

(Clip of ALOUD – SEX AND SUN)

Phil: It was basically a big Club Tropicana turning Cyril and Gregory into George and Andrew

Olly (interjecting): … Phil’s in the video as well!

Phil: I made a guest appearance.

Olly: As a gay bartender with quite an amazing moustache.

Phil:. No one else would do it, so I had to.

(Clip of THE CRIBS – MIRROR KISSERS)

Olly: For the Cribs video, we shot the band on DV in a white, in a plain white room and then edited the straight video in black and white…

Phil: In one night…

Olly: In one night, yeah…and we got an antique photocopier and basically printed every frame of the video

Phil: …which was two thousand, seven hundred and fifty…

Olly: …which was two thousand, seven hundred and forty-something frames of…

THE CRIBS – MIRROR KISSERS

Phil: …so you’ve got this stack of A3 prints,  and over each print you’ve photocopied, so it’s like on an old analogue photocopier so you’ve got that lovely kind of quality of the ink… you then hand draw. We had a team of people that came down. We had friends who were from like graphic designers, artists, anyone who was free after work just coming down, scribbling for a couple of hours. Then you get the print and you have to take a photograph of it, then you get these thousands of photographs and you put them all back in sequence Olly: Some of the best videos are where you think “Right, let’s take this and try and explore every possible angle of how we can use this object”. I think that’s what we were trying to do.

THE CRIBS – MIRROR KISSERS

Phil: Here’s a label who’ve got an act and some money and they come to you and say “Make me a video” which basically for them is to sell their artist. And then there’s the other side where you say to yourself this is the video I want to make, and I want to make it about something I’m interested in, something I like doing, something I want to craft and put some skill into… so there’s a bit of a marriage, there’s a double edge to it.

(Clip of MAXIMO PARK – APPLY SOME PRESSURE)

Olly: So, the Maximo Park video…

Phil: ‘Apply Some Pressure’

Olly: …it started at my Mum’s house with a chest of drawers that, funnily, I used to keep my Lego in as a kid… So there’s a really, slightly embarrassing test of me and Phil popping out of a chest of drawers…

Phil: That’s another thing… it’s like, getting an idea through the door at a record company, you can write it down and say “There’ll be loads of drawers popping out in sequence to the music, and someone will pop out and play guitar, and someone will pop out and play bass…” and they’ll be like “Really?”…

Olly: Bollocks. How does that work?

Phil: So we went about it and just shot it.

Olly: We just ran out of time. But there was so much that we wanted to do on that shoot…

Phil: We just tried to make it as entertaining as far as we could, stuck a nose bleed in just for good measure…

Olly: It kind of suits Paul cos he’s got that… (clenches teeth) he’s singing the song harder, and it looks like his brain’s going to blow… Yeah, it suits him having blood dripping down his face.

Phil: He stole my tie by the way. I want my tie back, Paul. It’s a good tie.

Olly: Unless you’ve got oodles of cash stuffed in an attic, you can’t get away with just being a director and saying I’m going to be a music video director and get paid lots of money.

Phil: It’s very competitive, and there are only so many jobs and there are so many directors so you kind of have to realise that for every 10 pitches you write, you might only get one… or even less

Olly: We always sort of approach our jobs thinking “Ooh, what can we make?” It’s not just like “Let’s make a person look cool and iconic” cos that’s kind of boring, you know.

Olly: So yeah, we did the Tiny Dancers video…

(Clip of TINY DANCERS – I WILL WAIT FOR YOU)

Phil: I used to do a lot of old films and things on DV and I just noticed that if you rush a whip pan past, in the middle of it, you can cut from one section to another without it looking like you’ve kind of done anything. It’s a very cheap way of making a transition but it works. It meant that we could put a band member anywhere around the house and just continually move through doors and up stairs and into tents and anything we could think of, just to keep it moving. It was kind of a one-shot-ish type thing.

Phil: There was one trick shot where David is holding a DV camera and it looks like he’s in a mirror because we put doubles…

Olly: …yeah, two identical lamps…

Phil: We did a rather clever thing with some books: two lamps, two books reversed so it looks like it’s a little mirror. Pan up, find David, pan away, then you walk through the mirror and he was… You blink and you miss it but that was our way of saying to ourselves “OK it’s shot on DV” but get away with it.

TINY DANCERS – I WILL WAIT FOR YOU

Phil: We like to go out and hunt around for things.

Olly: Yeah it’s fun

Phil: We’ll do a day or two researching props we want in our video rather than sending someone else out to get them.

(Clip of THE BLACK GHOSTS – ANY WAY YOU CHOOSE TO GIVE IT)

Olly: It’s kind of inspired by the scene in Alien where…  you know, taking the android apart and seeing little bits of…

Phil: We just loved the idea of the band making themselves, do you know what I mean? And then their robot selves going out and doing little performances at the end, but that would take a lot of money and time!

Phil: We went to all of the flea markets and stuff, picking up things for a couple of quid, hoovers and…

Olly: …car boot sales… It was just a huge pile of junk and it comes down to like, “Oh, bike levers work as fingers!”

Olly: We were trying to think of ways to make simple bodily parts that would play the instruments so we thought, you know, an umbrella’s got fingers in it so it was really simple, we just took all the fingers out of the umbrella and turned it back to front and wired them all into one point and you could pull it and all the fingers would move and it was like “Huh! Cool!”

Olly: When we were shooting we had a smoke machine running all the way through. This was on Dean’s Street in Soho in central London, a working five-floor, office building that we were sneakily squatting in the basement and we had smoke machines running all day… we had a two day shoot and we just kept it running and it was slowly running into the lift shaft…

Phil: … and the fire ducts and the air vents…

Olly: …and  the fire brigade turn up, these eight massive guys with like axes kind of come in and I’m stood next to the alarm panel and say “Yes, it’s totally our fault, it’s just a smoke machine, really really sorry. I can’t turn the thing off”. And there’s this big control panel, and he goes up to a big red button that says ‘Off’ and… Shit!

THE BLACK GHOSTS – ANY WAY YOU CHOOSE TO GIVE IT

Phil: The Checks for us were just like a really great rock n roll band. We went to see them and we just went “They’re a great band”.

(Clip of THE CHECKS – WHAT YOU HEARD)

Phil: We really loved the fact that Sven just rocks out solos like an old Zeppelin record. The record label said to us “Look, we need a video that shows them as a rock band”

Olly: Yeah, we were so glad we did…

Phil: …it was a great relationship working with them…

Olly: …they’re just great fun to film, I mean you just pull the strings and let go…

Phil: And on that we just got to know what you can do with a steadicam which just led us into the next job with The Enemy which we used for the whole day I think.

(Clip of THE ENEMY - HAD ENOUGH)

Olly: Yeah, the Hoosiers…

(Clip of THE HOOSIERS – WORRIED ABOUT RAY)

Olly: It was brilliant fun cos we got to make Cyclops.

Phil: They were looking for something to tie-in with the title of the track really. I think the ‘Ray’ element is “Who is Ray?” “Is he a member of the band?” Is he…? I mean we had loads of ideas. But we ended up just adding Ray Harryhausen into the band. We kind of admired things about Mr Ray Harryhausen when we were growing up… I think we’re both big fans of the movies that Ray did with very limited means and a lot of energy and effort, and had always kind of wanted to make a band have a fight…

Olly: …with a monster…

Phil: …with a giant monster…

Phil: … and it was just one of those jobs when you say to anyone “We’re going to do an authentic sort of claymation, stop-frame, monster” and they’re all like “Yes please!”

Olly: The first person who worked on it was Neil Hedger who’s a really really talented sculptor and film sculptor, and he sculpted the monster to our…

Phil: …specification

Olly: … to our silly specification…

Phil: So he did a beautiful sculpt basically out of…

Olly: …wax

Phil: …wax modelling clay stuff…

Phil: …around a skeleton frame which is made out of wire and ball bearings so you can manipulate and move all the joints

Olly: To see and to work on something with a monster where, you know it’s not real, and it’s not like it feels any more real, but it’s so much more satisfying seeing something physical that’s tangibly there that you can almost see and taste the paint on it a bit.

Phil: It was actually a marriage of mad ideas and a band who have the ability to put themselves in those scenarios and not look… well, look stupid… but get away doing it.

Olly: There are some bands that you wouldn’t be able to say “OK guys, now imagine there’s a 24 foot high Cyclops, swinging a lamp post at you… Go!” … they’re just a total pleasure to work with.

(Clip of THE HOOSIERS – GOODBYE MR A)

THE HOOSIERS – GOODBYE MR A

Phil: How do you follow up a giant monster having a fight with the band? That was the big question I think, in both of our heads. And the only way seemed to be to turn all of the band into superheroes. It was like “Ooh, what can we have? We need a Hoosier-mobile. Let’s get a VW van and put an ‘H’ on the front of it. Olly: And we had an animated sequence in there that we drew by hand with pen and ink, old skool, cos we wanted to make it feel like the original Adam West… Phil: But the premise of it… Olly: …title sequence

Phil: …was that Mr A was another imaginary character that The Hoosiers had invented (they seem to have a few of those in their songs). But we just thought that Mr A could be this… he’s supposed to be this guy who knows everything, and I think the clincher was probably when we said “You get to keep your own superheroes costume and have them hanging in your cupboard”.

Phil: There were lots of fun things to build on that one…rockets… and we got to do flying which was great: green-screening and wire work, again something we hadn’t done so we thought we’d throw that in. There were so many different set-ups to get through, it was quite an extremely fast-turning-over shoot…

Olly: It was the most fun shoot ever in the world.

THE HOOSIERS – GOODBYE MR A

Olly: Yeah, Newton Faulkner, playing with big toys and big effects and stuff. Really good fun. We built a twenty foot by twelve foot by eight foot room, which we built inside a scaffolding cage about ten foot up in the air, that we could roll three hundred and sixty degrees.

Phil: We could have Newton defying gravity on every surface…

Olly: Bad joke.

Phil: It looks quite simple, I think, when you’re watching it. You don’t really go “How?” cos you’re just kind of accepting it but it was a ball-ache…

Olly: It was really complicated

(Clip of NEWTON FAULKNER – TEARDROP)

Phil: Turning over hunks of metal does take time…

Olly: …six and a half tons…

Phil: …ten feet in the air with chains and tackles…

Olly: …six and a half tons of set hanging from the ceiling…

Phil: But really satisfying - standing in a room that is completely upside down is really quite weird

Olly: It’s been fun this year because we’ve been doing so many jobs. He’s been cutting one video, whilst I’m storyboarding the next one, you know, so it’s quite fun.

(Clip of SONNY J – ENFANT TERRIBLE)

Olly: So, the last job of the year was ‘Enfant Terrible’, which is a great little track…

Phil: And we shot that on Thursday…

Olly: Yeah, last Thursday in a big top, Zippo’s big top circus.

Olly: We had a dwarf who I taught to play guitar, and a Seikh warrior who I taught to play bass, and a giant that Phil taught to play drums. And  a brilliant burlesque dancer called Roxy Velvet who was on the high trapeze, doing… singing the middle eight.

Olly: We had this university lecturer phone up and say “We want to come down to a shoot, and see what the shoot is going to be like and interview Diamond Dogs…”

Phil: “…and see what video-making is all about”

Olly: “…and find out about it”. And we said “You’re only allowed down if we can dress you as whatever we want”. We had him in a pair of tights with a giant bird skull on his head, playing the cello… like a guitar. Yeah, I think he had a whale of a time, the poor guy.

SONNY J – ENFANT TERRIBLE

Phil: So that was a day in the life of Diamond Dogs.

Olly: Thank you very much! Mind the dogs on the way out!