Daniel Gray Longino and Eric Notarnicola bring us “MEOW” by Anamanaguchi, a video so packed full of fun and ridiculousness that we'd never be able to encapsulate it all into one intro - believe us, we've tried. Please enjoy the video, and then the interview with Daniel and Eric below.

Doug: This is the first video for Anamanaguchi, and first music videos have a way of setting the tone for an artist. I'm curious what tone you guys think this video sets for them?

Eric: It’s very personal for them. It’s very much a reflection of their personalities. They get to play heightened versions of themselves when they transform at the arcade.

Daniel: They wanted it to serve as an introduction to the band. I met Pete Berkman a couple of years ago, and he just has the best personality. His energy is just off the charts. He’s so crazy positive about the things he likes. He’s just so excited - he wants to talk to you about everything he likes no matter what it is, whether its music or TV or a game or something else. I feel that’s the vibe they were looking for for this video, just like, “We’re so excited to show you everything.”

Doug: As far as director credits, Anamanaguchi is credited alongside the two of you. In what capacity were they involved in the directing process?

Daniel: They wrote the video. Basically, when Pete sent us to treatment, there were a million ideas. We had to figure out a way to make it a thousand ideas. They had so many things they wanted to get across, so we served as the way to show all those elements in a cinematic way. Just tried to make it not so overwhelming. They were really particular about everyone’s look. We have these different gangs in the video, and they each have this hero profile that introduce you to the gang. The band was definitely very particular about what those would look like. What everyone was wearing, or who was in what. The n Eric and I shot listed together and talked the whole video through. We’re both editors, so we want to edit the video in our mind’s eye before we even shoot it, which helps a lot when there’s so many ideas you want to fit in.

Eric: The treatment was so dense that it was really a matter of figuring out the bare minimum of the elements that we needed to get to make it all fit together. Even then, we still have a lot of leftover stuff. There’s just so much that everyone wanted to get, and we just had to compact it and edit it down until it fit the length of the song.

Doug: Because there were so many ideas going in that you had to shave them down even before you started, was there not much room for improvisation when you guys are shooting? Was everything you shot at least talked about beforehand?

Daniel: We talked about everything beforehand and it was very tight to try to get everything, but I think a lot of it did come out of just saying, “Okay, now we have all these people here. We’re shooting them. Let’s see what funny things happen.”

Eric: There was definitely improv, especially with the action scenes and meetups. The band members and their friends who play the gang members are all very naturally funny and were able to give us a lot of great moments. Then we had to quickly move on to the next shot.

Doug: What about in post? Was there any room to play with some stuff in the back end?

Eric: There was definitely room to play in the back end. That’s something we do a lot when we edit. We’re into changing things more in the edit than you might expect. Trying out a lot of possibilities and ideas. We definitely did a lot of that with the this video. Some of the shots were very set up, like a lot of the VFX shots - like the deaths, when Pete gets his head cut off -those were pretty much pre-planned because we needed certain plates and that sort of thing to make that work. Other concepts, like when Ary turns into the Furby, that was an idea that we came up with in the edit bay. We bought a box of old Furbies on eBay, and shot them on a turntable for that shot.

Doug: You guys had a relatively significant arts and animation team contributing on this video, how does the process of assembling this team work? Do you have an edit and effects house that you work out of it, or is there a different process behind that?

Eric: The editing and the effects were just Dan and I, and then there were several graphic designers and animators. We brought on one of the designers and rest were friends of the band.

Daniel: My friend Cris Shapan is a graphic genius, he did most of the titles and the gang logos. He also designed the cartoon cat logo in the first shot of the arcade. His work is so amazing. The band would also just email us Photoshop files from various artists and then we just kept adding layer after layer.

Eric: The band has a lot of really creative friends. They got a lot of favors from friends who would make cool graphics and send them our way, which is awesome.

Daniel: Every time we get anything from them, it would be like, “Oh, okay. That’s amazing. All right, let’s put this in. This is making us look better.”

Eric: The interesting thing about this video, and Anamanaguchi in general, is they have a very honed visual aesthetic. You go to their website, and you look at their Tumblr, and it’s a very cool and unique graphical sensibility that we try to convey with this video. Also through the animation segment, which is important to touch on.

Daniel: That segment was animated by these guys, Mike Scott and Carl Douglas among others. Once we got the first rough version of that animated segment, during the bridge of the song, the video really started to come together.

Eric: Those guys are amazing. The transformation between all those pop icons was great, but when you read on the treatment you’re like, “I don’t know what that’s quite going to look like.”

Daniel: The band, basically, they handled that whole thing. Along with Mike and Carl, just directed that whole segment.

Eric: They gave us the finished animated chunk that goes into the bridge. We just dropped it in.

Doug: Moving to the actual shooting of the video, that was also pretty significant. There’s a large cast and there’s a lot of setups, like you guys described. Do you think that the director team, the fact that there are two of you working on this video together, helps manage that large head and stuff like that?

Daniel: There were parts where we would literally just separate and just go do our own stuff.

Eric: We had a B-camera unit, so we would separate and tackle shots two at a time, which was very helpful considering the schedule was pretty tight. There were just a lot of shots to get so, yeah, that was definitely a big help. Also, of course, our producer, Sydney Buchan, we couldn’t have done it without her. I don’t know how she wrangled that huge cast. The band had a big part to do with that, too, because everyone that’s in the video is pretty much friends with the band. People they know in real life, or some people they just knew online and they had met for the first time on the shoot day.

Doug: It seems like you guys had free access to the greatest arcade on earth. What is that process when you do shoot at a place like that, with go-karts and stuff? Is the staff there helping you along the way and making sure that everything goes smoothly, or are you left to start go-karts on your own?

Daniel: There was this one go kart pit man who just really wanted to be in the video the whole time. We kept trying to work him in.

Eric: He never made it in. He was very nice and he let us ride the go-karts during a breaks, which was pretty cool. The arcade was shot at a separate location from the go-karts, and that location also had employees who had to spend the entire night with us.

Daniel: We were shooting all of hours of the night. I didn’t have all my clothes, so I needed to borrow a shirt from Pete. He says, “Here, you need to take this referee shirt. Since you’re directing, it’ll be your director’s shirt. You’ve got to wear it.” Then when we show up to Sport Time, it’s actually the uniform for everyone that works there. There were several staff members on-hand while we were shooting, so they’d be walking around in their referee shirt, and I had on my referee shirt, and it was funny.

Doug: You guys mentioned that you had a B-camera unit, is that why you guys have two DPs credited?

Daniel: One of the cameras was just the behind the scenes camera, and then we realized, “Oh, we’re not going to get everything in time."

Eric: We scrapped the behind the scenes and just used it for the in front of the scenes stuff. Our primary DP was Kevin Hayden, he shot all the A cam stuff with the RED, Josh was shooting on the 7D. Most of the story footage that you see in the video is Kevin's. A lot of the extra footage of the gangs playing around at the arcade, that's the B-cam.

Doug: There’s a moment halfway through the video, I think it’s the drummer from the band, he walks up to a guy. The guy pulls a knife out and it upset, and it cuts back to the drummer. You cut back to the guy who then pulls the knife out again more confidently. I don’t think I have a question about this moment. I just wanted to thank you guys for it because I just keep replaying it. It’s just so hilarious. I don’t know what it is about that moment.

Daniel: Because there’s real failure on the guy’s face. This guy does this awesome knife trick and the first time he tried it doesn’t work and he’s like, "Ah, shit!"

Eric: He couldn’t get it to work. He did it a couple of times and it kept not going out all the way, it was stuck. That was his real look on his face when it happened. We just used that footage. That’s a real moment, that’s why it looks so funny because he’s actually frustrated.

Doug Klinger is the co-founder/content director of IMVDb and watches more music videos than anyone on earth. You can find him on twitter at @doug_klinger.