I’d posted a link to this music video a while back, along with a brief story about the team behind it (Creato-Destructo Imagery, which is rolling with a number of projects).
Given the nature of the video’s “story”, we’ve received some interesting and thought-provoking feedback over the last few weeks. (Full disclosure, I officially served as the 1st AD on this, although everyone performed multiple duties — driving, to animal-wrangling, to prop mastery, to traffic coordination; among a few of the more interesting tasks).
To add some perspective, I got the director, Jerry Stifelman, to reveal some of his thoughts and artistic insights:
“‘Working Women/Lazy Demons’ is a catchy, bouncy song with a dark side. It is an ode to working woman, yet it’s also an insight into the singer’s dark side. It’s almost like he’s a vampire, sucking energy from working women to enable his torpor.
“We came up with the idea of the protagonist (who we named ‘Cal’ in honor of James Dean’s character in ‘East of Eden’) living inside his car and watching the world at a distance as a way to symbolize this. So on one side, the video depicts working women, yet always from the at-a-distance perspective of Cal.
“To cut against the upbeat theatricality of the song, we kept the imagery very naturalistic and documentary-feeling — while still doing things with slow-motion and camera angles to idealize the women, since we’re seeing them from Cal’s perspective. Unlike pop songs, films work best when there is some type of narrative arc, so we decided to bring the video to a resolution, when Cal actually breaks his lazy bubble and engages the worker at the gas station.
“To keep the ending from being too sentimental, we kept this shot very wide. This shot breaks from the rest of the video, which either focuses solely on Cal or sees via his perspective. The last shot is the film equivalent of breaking into third-person narration. Personally, to me the song has always felt a bit like one of those songs that used to open 70’s TV shows like ‘Mary Tyler Moore’, the freeze frame montage was a nod to those shows, which used freeze frames to celebrate characters.”
And of course, best wishes to Randy Bickford and Wyley Pamplin of The Strugglers, and hopes for much great musical and artistic success!
James Hyatt 