Video Chats: MENZ on 'Bootleg Fireworks' by Dillon Francis

Often times, a lot of post-heavy music videos don’t really come together until the backend. However, the video for “Bootleg Fireworks” by Dillon Francis was built almost entirely in the edit, so the plan when shooting for director team MENZ (Michael Giambra and Bill Benz) was just to get as much coverage of Dillion’s head as possible. We talked to Michael and Bill about the video, fly girls, and getting inspiration from some NBA commercials.

Doug: Where did the original idea for this video come from?

Michael: We got an email from Dillon and Dillon’s management with a very simple premise: “His face on a woman’s body, pogoing.” They also sent us a reference of this NBA Playoffs commercial with photo stills of NBA players heads on the bodies of a funk band. Then looking through his blog he has this visual theme of putting his head on different people’s bodies or cat’s bodies, so we wanted to try to incorporate different viral videos and insert Dillon’s head.

Bill: His whole aesthetic is it seems like his mind has been warped by the internet. Like his brain is a tumblr.

Michael: We were in communication with him and his management. We sent them a bunch of references and wanted to incorporate these professional dancers throughout the video and the idea kind of expanded from there.

Bill shooting Joe Stakun who played the arms legs of the tiny Dillon's at the end of the video

Doug: Did you guys actually even shoot with him to get the heads or does he have stock heads are ready to go?

Michael: There is a website where you can download all Dillon heads.

Bill: No, we went to his apartment and shot him.

Doug: Did you have an idea in your head of what you were going to put them on, or did you just get full coverage of him looking different ways with different expressions?

Bill: We got lots of coverage. More than anything else we’ve worked on before, we didn’t know as much going into the edit, what it was going to be.

Michael: It was all made in the edit. We knew we had to get every angle of his head and then we figured out which head was going to be on which video later.

Mike, Bill, and Joe thoroughly check the shot

Doug: Did you have a narrative progression at all for the video?

Bill: We did have the idea of that it would be him by himself for the first part of the song. We started with the idea that he was like a virus and he was spreading through all of these videos. Originally it was more about specifically a virus, and then he splits off into the girl dancer, and then the very end is just the weird head versions of him.

Michael: Yeah a bunch of tiny mutant Dillons start popping up and eventually the whole video gets so infected that it just shuts down.

Doug: So this virus concept was the reason behind you guys using a female dancer for some of it?

Michael: Dillon thought it would be funny to put his head on like Lana Del Rey or some other popular female artist. We’re like "OK, that’s pretty funny." So we wanted to get a girl dancer in there too to make the video grow conceptually. It kind of added to the whole dynamic you see in early 90s R&B and hip-hop videos - there’s always the main dancer doing his thing with all these fly girls dancing sexy behind him.

Doug: And what about the process with shooting with the dancers? Obviously you shot them on green screen. Were you just letting them go nuts or did you have a more clear idea at that point of what you guys were going for?

Michael: Yeah, we had a few specific moves in mind that we sent them, a few video references, and we asked them what else they could do. They ended up bringing up a lot to the table. Addison, who was the male dancer, he does a lot of like martial arts, so he’s doing a lot of flips and it’s added to a lot of what you saw in the video. And Maile, the female dancer was such a perfect match with Addison’s rhythms, they both killed it.

Addison being athletic

Doug: Then getting back to the edit and determining what clips to use in the video. What was that process like of picking those out?

Bill: We didn’t want to have every viral video you could think of from the last couple of years, we didn't want to do all the really big ones. Obviously, we’ve got like “Gangnam Style” in there, but we wanted a lot of it to be videos that are not as well known videos, but where there is just something familiar about it - like the MTV Beach House stuff.

Michael: I think a lot of the videos ended up taking a lot of viewers back, like when they see the clip they laugh because they remember these moments when they were younger seeing it on TV and now it’s in this viral form.

Doug: So what the division of labor between you guys on a video like this that is so post-heavy? Are you just kind of taking turns in the edit?

Bill: Before we edit we are like, "All right, you do this part and I’ll do this part." We just cut it in half basically.

Doug: And since you guys didn't really know what you were going to do with the footage when you first shot it, were there a lot of notes and did you guys have to make a lot of changes?

Bill: Actually, the most insane part of the whole thing is that as soon as we sent them like the first solid pass of it, they just said "This is your guys’ thing, do whatever you want."

Michael: I don’t know if they were expecting something less or something more crude, but it seemed like they were really blown away with the whole thing, almost like they couldn’t give us notes. They didn’t know what to say, which is a good thing I guess. But they did want to incorporate some of their friends’ music videos in there, kind of like as an homage or a funny surprise for his collaborators. So we threw in a Diplo video and a Calvin Harris video.