Vampire Weekend at Bernie's is a comedic musical act from Ohio that writes aggressively crass satire songs and uses shock value to entertain their audience. At the average Vampire Weekend at Bernie's show, the vocalist will most likely get partially, if not fully naked, shower in beer, and piss off at least one or two people in the room.
Vocalist and front man Steven Walls and I got to talking about music videos one night and I casually stated to him how I would film his music video if I were the one doing it. To my surprise, he absolutely loved the idea and asked me if I would direct his video for him. I agreed and started story-boarding the shoot.
Meanwhile, a close friend of ours, Art, had been egging Steven on to let him be a part of his project for months. He allowed him on a couple shows to test him out, but he wasn't "officially" a part of the project yet. Needless to say, he started to become really insistent that he be in the music video.
Art, being the goofball that he is, made me realize that I had a golden opportunity here to A, make both of my friends happy, B, make this release even more obnoxious than we had already planned it to be, and C, create something that our friends would maybe want to get in on.
I called up Art one morning and told him that I needed him to shoot some of the music video. I showed up at his house with my GoPro, pointed it at his face and said "alright, go." For the next couple days, I more or less followed him around places and had him pretend to be Steven and pretend that everyone we got on camera was Steven for the "music video".
We went to multiple different venues and filmed as many drunk people as we possibly could, along with as many random interviews with Art as we could get. Once we got together 5 hours of footage, I went to work editing. Art was excited to see what we did with the music video.
Only, little to his knowledge, we had already shot the music video a week prior and it was almost already finished. Steven ended up clogging the drain in my shower with tater tot casserole and got it ALL over my basement during the filming. It was hard to cover up and keep our mouths shut, but we managed to keep it a secret from him until the premiere. The camera guy I got on sent me all the files the night of and I had the majority of the video done by the time we started filming the second video. Steven made the announcement that he was working on releasing a music video for his crowd favorite "Tater Tot Casserole" and people got excited and anxious to see what this wild card had up his sleeves.
The next month I spent taking all the footage and making it into the most irrelevant, ridiculous nonsense I could piece together. We planned a release screening on a Tuesday to make sure that not many people were able to make it and we told everyone that the official music video would be released April 1st because we knew people would expect it. On April 1st, we said "April Fools" and refused to release anything. I decided to push anticipation further and made a template iMovie "trailer" that featured Steven catching his hair on fire to build the hype. On the 25th, we released the "Documentary" of the making of the music video, which was far, far from it. We made people sit through a 45 minute long video of various people rambling or answering interview question that had nothing to do with the song, none of the band's music, and only 3 seconds of Steven at the tail end. We were pleased.
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We waited about 2 months before it became an ongoing joke that there was no video before we started talking about releasing the music video again. When we finally released it, the responses were absolutely priceless. Art was disappointed that he wasn't in the real music video, but happy that he more or less got to star in his own film. It was worth every second of my time to get to experience this insane process and be a part of such a strange project.
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So that's the story of my first job directing a music video. I was the most fun I've had in years and people seemed to really enjoy it once it was finally released and appreciated the lengths we went to draw it out and add as much detail to the joke as possible. I hope you all enjoyed reading this and enjoy watching the videos in context.
