Video Chats: Scott Cudmore on 'Wasted' by METZ

Family portraits are notorious for being awkward. There is a website dedicated to it. You can be the coolest, most photogenic family ever, but if I hand you over to a Sears photographer, 10/10 you're going to end up looking like this. In the video for “Wasted” by METZ, director Scott Cudmore takes that fact and amplifies it by adding data mashing, face manipulation, and celery to the mix. We talked to Scott about the video, the visual effects, and the joys of portrait studio imagery.

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

Scott: I just have always been amused by portrait studio imagery, and I started looking at websites like Awkward Family Photos and things like that. I was looking at that website and it probably came up that way. There’s something funny about those portraits, but also sad, and beautiful, and intimate. This video is more on the creepy/strange/funny side, but I think that’s part of what is so compelling about portrait studio photographs. The data-mashing and everything was an idea that happened after the band had been pitched the concept - during production, and then more in post-production.

Doug: What about the styling of the video? Was that also based on old family photos, or was there a certain era that you were trying to recreate in the video?

Scott: Probably the 90s I guess, but not really. If anything, the 80s and 90s were the era of when those portrait studios were probably most used. I don’t know how much use they get now. I remember when I was a kid going into Sears and places like that and getting those family photos so it’s kind of just based off of the references that already exist. Most of the images you’ll see from portraits studios like that are not very contemporary although there are of course still portrait studios around. They are mostly from the 80s and 90s. In a lot of cases we just were referencing specific images and modeling the wardrobe and styling off of that.

Doug: What was the process of assembling the wardrobes? Did you do some thrifting?

Scott: Jocelyn Gammage did the styling and for a lot of it we would just riff on it. We cast a lot of friends and we cast a lot of other people in Toronto bands. We just assembled this huge cast of people and then would look at their picture or think of who they were and try to think of what would be good for that particular portrait or for that particular group of people. We just would lay it all out and then look at it together. Some of it we came up with immediately, it was really obvious, like the metal/goth group. Then other stuff, like the guy wearing the balloons, that came from an image Jocie saw that was of a kid dressed up like a bag of Jelly Belly candy for Halloween, so she recreated that for Jeff.

Doug: Was pretty much everything that we see in the video based on something that you guys had seen before? Like the celery and stuff, or was some of that stuff randomly placed in there?

Scott: Most of it I would say was randomly placed in there. Most of it wasn’t based on anything, aside from that bag of balloons. The celery is kind of an inside joke between myself and the guy in the shot - that’s my friend Josh, he’s eating that celery. We were at a friend’s birthday party and there was a big bowl of celery, and Josh and I ate all the celery and it was funny to us. We stood beside that celery bowl for a long time. That happened like a couple of weeks before we shot the video. When we decided to put him in it, I thought it would be funny to have him eating celery in the video. It just became an on-going inside joke between us, I don’t know, it’s pretty stupid.

Doug: I think it fits the vibe.

Scott: Yeah, it kind of works with the rest of it. He runs a record label called Artificial Records in Toronto.

Doug: So was everyone a friend pretty much as you know everyone who was going to be there ahead of time? There wasn’t like an open casting call or anything like that?

Scott: No, It was pretty much all friends, and then a couple of the cast members from the Wet Blanket video are also in it. The first portrait you see is the cast from the other video - the main girl, and the father, and the boyfriend from that video. So that was like a little reference to the previous video. And the little ballerina girl from Wet Blanket is in this one too. Pretty much everybody else are friends, and a lot of them also play in other bands in Toronto. There’s members of Holy Fuck, Fucked Up, The Wooden Sky, The Soupcans, Teenanger, and Hell Shovel. We just wanted to keep it in the family and that tied in also with family portrait aspect.

Doug: Did you give a lot of the type of direction that maybe an Olan Mills-style of photographer would have given back in the day?

Scott: There was actually very, very little direction. Most of the direction is in just the wardrobe and the look of it. Once they are in there, there is not a lot to do. I would try and just pose them and like give them props and just do it that way but since there is so little action and not very much interaction either it was very different. It was just like shooting photos really. We would get them to do a whole bunch of different facial expressions because I knew I was going to re-arrange people’s facial features. We would just get a variety of different expressions so that we could then manipulate what the final expression would be.

Photo by Jeremy Jansen

Doug: Most of the effects in the video are pretty obvious, but if you look closely there are some that are a bit more subtle, like the stuff with the face manipulation. Is that done pretty frequently in this video?

Scott: Not to everyone. We didn’t do it to everybody but I think we probably did it to about half of the people. There was a period where we were talking about having people’s features melt off their faces, and go really extreme with it, but that was also beyond our ability to do it in a convincing way. I knew that I wanted it to look real. I was just looking to move people’s eyes, creating a disorienting look on people’s faces rather than going like into horror movie territory. I didn’t want to do that.

Doug: And what’s the technical process of some of those visual effects, like the manipulating of the faces and the data-mashing of the clips on top of each other?

Scott: There’s a couple of programs you do that in. I just looked it up and sort of followed the instructions. There’s like a really great Kanye West video that’s much more aggressively data-moshed, and there is that Chairlift video, which I think might be the first one that uses the technique, I don’t know for sure. I think those guys were the first to do it at least in a music video context, but I’m sure it was probably done by video artists before. There is a video on YouTube that just tells you how to do it, it tells you where to download the two pieces of software you need to do it. So when I knew that I wanted to use that technique, I didn’t want to use it like completely abstractly. I wanted it to simulate like the breaking down and the transitions. I was trying to use in a musical way - like when the guitars come in, we’d have it explode like that, rather than trying like to make it just like this full on abstract collage of data mashing. I wanted the data moshing itself to be an accent, and not become the crux of the video, so that's how I went about using it, or tried to. I wanted to keep the video about the world of the portrait studio and the characters and have those digital effects be about how to handle the transitions. I didn't ever think of it as being a wholly abstract piece.