Wellwishers: Commentary Continues
It was late one fall night and I was halfway through a bottle of Cabernet when Kevin sent me the mp3 file for Wellwishers and asked if I had any thoughts on a video concept. As I shut my eyes and listened to the song for the first time, I envisioned a young Bob Dylan rifling through those white signs, each with a different lyric. There was just something about the phrasing of each line that evoked this iconic black and white imagery. My initial idea was to have various members of the band and crew holding up signs with the lyrics of the song as we went about our normal daily routine. Upon discussing the concept with Kevin, he suggested other interesting ways of displaying the lyrics, such as a text on a cell phone, the display of a synthesizer or a strategic array of Skittles backstage. We started making a list and embarked on our infamous Mustache Tour armed with Flip Cams and pre-pubescent peach fuzz on our upper lips. (Thanks to all of the ladies for the feedback. This is apparently not a good look for me).
There are a couple of scenes of which I have particularly fond recollections. The first is the cake shot (I know, sounds like a porn fetish, but read on). Most of us at Umphrey’s McGee are wannabe intellectual types with a penchant for good grammar and when we opened up the cake box, Kevin astutely spotted a typo in the frosting. The line was supposed to read “So be hopeful as a candle is worried for its flame” but apparently the baking industry in Reno, NV isn’t exactly the AP Stylebook and someone had included an extraneous apostrophe in the word “its”. So for the next several minutes, Kevin caressed the frosting and “deleted” the errant punctuation while I stood close by, mocking the irony of the situation. After all, this wasn’t exactly throwing a TV out a hotel window or imbibing half a bottle of Jack in a single swig. Yes, at Umphrey’s McGee, we reinvent the stuff of rock legends. We edit grammar on birthday cakes at load-in (sounds like a bumper sticker to me, Kev).
The frosting, caressed
The chorus of the video features a subtle trick that I blatantly stole from The Police’s 1983 video “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” As a television-obsessed child (I was 8 at the time), I remember learning that they had sped up the track to twice the original speed and Sting had lip-synced in Chipmunks-style double-time. Then, they adjusted the video to 50% resulting in all of those candles falling down in slow motion, while Sting’s mouth moved in real time. It was simple math, but it was a cool concept and one I always remembered. So for the first chorus in Wellwishers, we had Brendan sing in double-time, while everyone played touch football in the background. In the video, the football game (and Stasik’s touchdown reception – look closely) appears in slow motion. For the second chorus, we decided to do the reverse, thereby achieving the opposite effect and having the football action roll by at twice the normal speed. All the while, Brendan’s lips are moving in regular time.
Heisman
Another interesting math tidbit: 100% of all people that I showed the video to did not notice this trick.
But everyone commented on the ‘stache.
Jefferson