Described as a "love letter to VHS and childhood," the video for Starcadian’s "HE^RT" has a look and feel that will be very familiar (and hopefully close to the heart) of many readers who grew up in the era of VHS tapes and classic movies like The Last Starfighter. Co-directed by Starcadian and Rob O'Neill, "HE^RT" not only serves as promotional material for the video anthology Sunset Blood (the song is part of the film's original soundtrack), it also works as a standalone piece that was one of the highlights of SXSW. We talked to Rob and Starcadian about the concept behind the video, 80s VHS movies, and floppy disks.

Doug: This video is a part of the Sunset Blood film that’s coming out later this year. I’m interested in how this video and how this song fit into that piece.

Starcadian: My intention was to make the soundtrack to the best 80s fantasy movie that no one ever saw. It’s like an undiscovered Monster Squad or The Last Starfighter - a flop that someone discovered years later. The album is basically a 25th anniversary edition of the soundtrack. Inside that, every song in itself is a VHS tape, way in the back of a video store that has a fucking awesome cover hand drawn by Drew Struzan, produced by John Carpenter, these awesome makeup prosthetics and you think, "this movie is amazing." I want every song to be a separate little video tape. That’s how this started. That’s how "HE^RT" started. We’ve been buddies for a long time and I sent him the songs. I told him, "It's a free-for-all - pick whatever you want and let’s make a video." He goes, “'HE^RT'. We’ve got to go with 'HE^RT'.” I said, “All right, write your notes, let me know what you see in your head. I’ll let you know what I see in mine when you tell me.” It turns out we basically had the exact same idea, it was perfect.

Rob: Yeah, everything just layered on top of each other. I was able to get my hands on a spaceship cockpit. One of the benefits of living in LA is stuff just bubbles up.

Starcadian: He literally texted me, “Dude I have a cockpit.” I’m like, "we’re fucking making a video around that!" That’s exactly how it happened.

Rob: We put it on a flatbed truck and drove it from Hollywood to where I live. I took it as a starting point, tweaked it out, built a green screen and a cage around it, and we were off to the races.

Doug: You guys share a director credit on the video. What’s the collaboration on directing the project?

Rob: In this case, we came up with the idea. We spaced out the plan, the animatic, the shot list. I took up most of the preproduction, and all the live footage shooting, and then sent over all those plates. He took over most of the post stuff. We had another buddy who did some of the motion graphics on it. Starcadian was working on the edit and we bounced edits back and forth. He’s based in New York, I’m based in LA, but it was seamless. The whole process was real easy.

Starcadian: It was a pretty organic thing, like, "You take care of the live footage, I’ll take care of all the special effects and editing." It was completely 50/50; really streamlined. I was able to enjoy working on it too. I think we got it done in like a month.

Rob: It was a month basically from "here’s the idea" to uploading the file. It just came together really smoothly. We knew what we were doing and we had so many references that any time we were stuck, it was just finding what can we pull from, what can we get inspiration from. It’s like it just organically came out of our childhood mind.

Starcadian: We didn’t have to dig too deep. We’re both movie nerds.

Doug: Is there anything specific you guys could point to that you used for inspiration? There’s obviously a lot of 70s and 80s influences there.

Rob: Last Starfighter was big. We were pretty well versed in that stuff. During that time, we just drowned ourselves in those movies. My wife hated my Netflix queue. We just went to the well pretty deep and tried to dig around for anything and everything that would give us some inspiration.

Doug: It’s got like this VHS look to it. There some imperfections in the footage and some distortions. Did you guys actually run the footage through a VCR?

Starcadian: I got really anally retentive about that. There’s plug ins and stuff out there, but I wanted this to look exactly like it’s straight out of video tape. I basically took a blank video tape, recorded the noise and then superimposed it over the footage and then I tracked the jitter from Ghostbusters. We transposed all the numbers, so I could get the exact microjitter. You could try to do it by hand, but it’s going to look digital. It’s going to scream After Effects from a distance.

Rob: You're going to see it too much when you really just need to feel it.

Starcadian: Even the logo in the beginning, when you fade out digitally, the contrast usually fades out too. I remember spending a good three hours figuring out how to fade out and turn up the gamma at the same time, so it fades out like it’s on Panavision or on tape. We use all those little things and I got really caught up in the details. The tape feed also was something that took a while to figure out.

Rob: That was something towards the end, we probably would’ve been out maybe a half a week sooner, but we needed to tweak it and tune it. We spent so much time because it really adds so much to it, you immediately are sent back in time when you see it and it’s right.

Doug: It definitely seemed like it came right out of that era. What was there about that look specifically that drew you guys to it? Was there something that you wanted to explore about that era and that style of film?

Rob: I think it was mostly about just putting viewers back in time. Literally like you went to your parent’s house and found the old tape that you’d forgotten about and popped it in. I think we really wanted to explore that, and use it as a time travel device so that it’s clear. We had to really restrain ourselves with the effects. We both have enough visual effects background, so we could’ve gone super high end on so much of this stuff. When stars are coming closer to us, we said, "Make it look like it’s on glass plates and someone’s just moving it closer." But that’s not our nature, our nature is to go higher, higher, higher end, super photorealistic, so dialing it back was part of that idea of, "Oh, this is the way I remember things as a kid." It felt more honest in a way.

Starcadian: When you hear music from a film in a different situation, like you walk into someplace and you hear the song playing, you just turn into a kid - you have this shit eating grin and you remember it being from that movie. It makes you feel like you did when you first watched The Blues Brothers or Tails From the Dark Side or whatever. At the same time, this film is not about being retro. This is not about being a band that sounds like we’re from the 70s, but actually weren’t even born in the 70s. This isn’t a nostalgia gimmick thing, this is literally just us pouring our heart out and whether it was high-brow or low-brow, it’s irrelevant; it’s what informed us when we were kids. That’s what shaped us and what we consider good art and the pinnacle of what we can achieve artistically. It just happens that we painted it in a color that is recognizable to people of our generation, or around our generation. That’s all it is, it’s just a paint job on the core story.

Doug: I read that the floppy disk is a central element that you guys used, and of all the pieces of technology from that era, what was it about the floppy disk? Because that factors heavily into the video.

Starcadian: The story of using a floppy disk came from a huge inspiration for the album and the concept, this one machine in the 80s called Atari ST, which was a rival to Amiga. That was my first music machine when I was eight or seven. Back then it was a pretty solid synth-making machine - that also had video games. Because it was so good for making MIDI music, people would go nuts with all the soundtracks to all the crappy video games like RoboCop, the Amiga stuff, like really intense - musically intense - pieces. I still, to this day, have favorite songs that I ripped an mp3 off of my machine. I put a microphone and recorded it and I still listen to them because the melodies are so amazing. They’ve informed me musically and visually, so that’s initially where the floppy disk started. We started from that and then we started making a mythology out of it, so it turned into to our "One Ring." The Starcadian mythology, this mythical artifact that we will slowly start explaining.

Doug: You guys mentioned that SXSW was the first time you screened this film on the screen of this size. How do you guys thing what you were going for translated onto the big screen?

Rob: I think pretty well. Of course, as filmmakers, you’re always seeing the things you wish you had changed a little bit or done up, but overall the impact was there. I felt like when it came to the editing and the sync and all that stuff, it was super solid and it hit all the marks we wanted to hit. It’s definitely interesting to see it on such a big screen, but yes when the titles came up and the music kicked in it really worked. It was really exciting to see.

Starcadian: I thought it was hilarious too that we were such a sore thumb in the group of music videos. They were really well done videos. A lot of polish and really inventive and modern - they were very modern looking. Then we came out of nowhere with this silly logo at the beginning. I loved it.

Doug: So, is this the first time you've screened it with an audience?

Rob: Yeah, other than bringing people around the computer to show it. Pretty much that’s been it. It got a great response online and we get a lot of great feedback, so it’s nice to think that there was a theater full of 100,000 people that saw this video at some point, but it was cool to see it the other day with the smell of popcorn in the air.

Starcadian: It is a VHS tribute at the end of the day. It’s meant for you, not you and your 50 friends in a theater. It being mostly an Internet thing, and mostly a monitor and by yourself experience, is part of it. It's that kind of song.

Rob: A late night on your couch kind of experience.

Doug: What does screening at SXSW mean to you guys as the creators of the music video?

Rob: It means everything. There’s not a lot of really solid venues for music videos to screen and to meet other music video directors and to be a part of the film community as a whole, so because of the music side of SXSW, they do a really good job of supporting music videos and that lineup that screened was solid. It was really top notch stuff, so it’s great to be in that group, it’s great to be with that lineup. I was impressed because a lot of that stuff I’d seen before and was honored.

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.