The idea for the Something Anything video came out of two conversations.
Conversation 1:
Mike "Closer Video" Baldwin had come on board to direct and during a few fevered iChats it was decided that it should be a performance piece and Andy's guitar solo should be the keystone of that performance.
A month earlier on a flight to the US, I'd seen a picture in Entertainment Weekly of a still from an old movie. It showed a giant crouching down over a man on a beach against a blue sky. To give some scale, the small man would be the size of the giants little finger and the giant would be as big as a tower block. I sent Mike the picture and we agreed scale was the way to go.
Conversation 2:
At the same time I emailed my friend Richard. Richard was responsible for the commercial with all the beautiful multi coloured bouncy balls, bouncing down a hill in San Francisco to the music of Jose Gonzalez. Richard is a smart cookie. I told him about the scale idea. He came back the next day with a treatment for the video, however instead of making Andy GIANT he felt it would be darker to make him freakishly BIG.
Have him breathe in and grow as he built towards his big moment.
I sent Mike this idea. He loved it. Big Andy was born.
Mike and his production company got to work. The first thing on their list was "How do we make Big Andy". One way of doing it would be to have Andy perform in situ with a green screen behind him, afterwhich he would be superimposed onto the video.
The other, slicker but more time consuming way of doing it would be to shoot Andy by himself in situ and cut him out frame by frame then place him into the shot. This procedure is called rotoscoping.
The company who came onboard are called Glassworks. They are best known in the music world for their post production work on the Bjork video where two robots make out.
They agreed to a gruelling 2 weeks of frame by frame scissor work and miniscule manipulation. At 24 frames per second, and Andy in shot for about a minute of the video they would have to cut him out of roughly 1400 individual frames!
The next issue was location, location, location. Finding a perfect space for Big Andy to do his thing.
Mike scouted scores of shabby rehearsal spaces and bare rooms to no avail and it seemed we would never find "the" place until, at the 11th hour, a friend of ours, Jamie, who runs Ark Recordings suggested we try Moloko Studios.
It's where Ben Hillier works from. Think Tank was tracked there I believe. We worked with Ben ages ago when Tim Simenon produced a new version of Funny Thing for the More Than Us EP. Ben engineered that session. He is one of the few producers Nigel rates.
Mike's production company, Flynn were totally on the case. By the time we arrived at Moloko on Monday to shoot, everything was in place.
The last thing on the list was left to the make up girl.
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