When BRTHR (the duo behind colorful and visually interesting music videos for artists like Cris Cab, Angel Haze, and Nina Sky) teamed up with Emily Kai Bock to remix her video for “She Is The Wave” by Doldrums, their goal was to make it look like a crazy person edited it. Apparently, a crazy person with amazing After Effects skills. We talked to BRTHR about how remixing the video and collaborating with Emily on the project. 

Doug: How were you approached for this project?

BRTHR: Emily had gotten in touch with us back in November, and we were talking about a possible collaboration. She came up with the idea of a remix video for "She is the Wave," and we thought it would be really cool to give it a go, especially since we liked the track, and the content of the video is so strange and interesting. It was really surreal because we had been following her work, had seen the "She is the Wave" video before, and were all of the sudden given a hard drive with all the footage on it.

Doug: What was Emily's involvement in this particular piece?

BRTHR: She wanted to instill more chaos into the video, so that's what we started with. We sent her and Airick [from Doldrums] a mood board and some key themes of the video, and just went crazy on it. After we finished the first cut, Emily gave us a lot of pointers to enhance the video. This is actually the fourth cut.

Doug: Is this remix style video something your used to doing? What was your goal for the remix?

BRTHR: Definitely not something we are used to. However, our editing process was exactly the same as when we edit our own videos: go over the footage, think of some ideas, improvise, and try new things. We had a lot of fun with this edit though, because the track has so many layers of sounds, and that really enabled us to create a glitched out/chaotic universe, exactly what we planned to do.

Kyle Wightman and Alex Lee of BRTHR

Doug: You mentioned something about wanting to make it look like it was done by a crazy person? How did that work? 

BRTHR: Yes, for sure. The song is so intense, and we wanted people to feel overwhelmed, but in a good way. Kind of like, "What did I just watch?" It's funny cause we edited this in a burst of days - day and night - so by the end of the project we felt kind of crazy as well.

Doug: What were some of the techniques you guys used to achieve the effects in the video?

BRTHR: The effects itself are pretty simple, but I guess we achieved a lot of the key effects by really listening to the sounds, and making sure each frame of the video coincided with a certain sound. Some of the effects we use a lot is scaling up the image, but not for an extended period of time. There were some compositing elements as well, and a lot of that was done in Motion and After Effects.

Doug: How do the two of you collaborate on a video like this that is essentially all in the edit? Do you split things up?

BRTHR: We have an interesting collaborative process where we use a custom-made super computer that does all of our edits. In all seriousness though, we really just work on our own computers, split up the edit, and critique each other as we go along. This works to enhance our individual edits, and when we combine them in the end, they usually compliment each other. We really feel like this works for us.

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.