When it comes to making a one shot music video, all the elements need to be in place on both sides of the camera for the video to work out. For the Wild Nothing video for "Only Heather," directed by Ryan Reichenfeld, they not only needed to find an actor capable of wiping out on the pavement with a fake sword on each side of him, they also needed to find a steadicam operator who had enough endurance to maneuver a giant camera and rig throughout the take without wiping out on the pavement. Luckily for Ryan, actor James Downing and stedicam op Chris McGuire were up for the challenge of creating and capturing his concept. We talked to Ryan about the video, assembling the right team for the project, and keeping everyone from getting stabbed.

Doug: What was the process of coming up with this concept?

Ryan: It’s just one of those weird things where I went to a show in 2009 when I was actually doing VFX for Nabil on a video. It was my second job, maybe I was still in school. I just had this image of this guy with a sword through his chest and it didn’t have anything behind it. It was just like this image that just came into my mind and I just haven’t been able to push it out. It’s actually is an image I've been trying to work into a few different ideas, I just had never really panned out along the way. But with this one, it was a track. For me, it’s always a track. If I have an idea, even if I have a full concept flushed out, the track always changes the idea. Like for example, the RAC video I did. I had that whole thing already planned out exactly what was going to happen: this cowboy in this empty city. But when I heard that track, it just kind of changed the tone of what I wanted the concept to be. With the While Nothing video, I think a lot of people take it as this guy is heartbroken and he is so sad about a girl that just broke his heart. But what I actually intended it to be was, I intended it to be like he’s floating, almost. And in a way I want to express the floating with this kind of a woozy walk down the street. Like he’s kind of been punched in the face and dazed and how excited he is about this girl that he just met or whoever this person is that he just met. It’s the kind just was really that, it’s just more about a feeling than anything. I hate taking a track and looking at the lyrics and being like, “Oh, it’s 'Only Heather' that makes me feel this way” but it just so happened that the song, the music, the instrumental just kind of make me feel what the lyrics were also saying coincidentally. It was just about this expressing his feeling. It’s the same why we shot it in one take. We tried to make the move interesting and dynamic, but the move doesn’t come off as like an OK Go one take video. In most one-take videos it’s like, “All right. We’re going to drive this car, and then were going to get hit by paintballs and a monkey is going to jump out of the window, and then a ninja or five are all going to jump on the hood all in a row and play Pat-a-cake." Just all these really intricate choreography, which I love - I respect those videos so much. But for me, the motivation for having it being a one-take was more about the feeling and the easiness. Against this music and the subtext of the actor, having no cuts and just lingering on him helped express that inner feeling of walking home after meeting someone like that. To me, that’s what it did. That was really important to me. Although I do have to say that, that shot was the hardest shot I've ever got in my entire life. It was the most intense effort ever. We almost actually didn’t get it because it was not so difficult in terms of the choreography, but I didn’t realize what I gotten myself into when we were already in the water. It was pretty intense.

Doug: It feels like the way it's shot creates a bit of a reveal, was that intentional?

Ryan: I'm a big fan of progression in music videos. I know original ideas are really important, but there’s a director called Keith Schofield that I became friends with over the years. He did this video for Minus the Bear and it was a split-screen video. I was like, “Oh, OK. This is a cool trick,” and he would start by playing with the idea of it being split-screen and you little tricks along the way. But then as the video progress, he wouldn’t just leave it at that. He wouldn’t leave it at like, “Oh that’s that cool split-screen video." He would kind of fuck with the audience. One split-screen wouldn’t copy, it wouldn’t be symmetrical with the other side of the split-screen. It was this other sub-progression would happen throughout the video as well as like the original concept - which is it is a split-screen video. There is a line down the middle and stuff happens on the both sides of the screen. For me, the logline for this video is a guy walking down the street with a sword sticking to his chest. But the way I wanted to make it progress was through a visual reveal of what was happening. I wanted the camera to start out on the ground, literally like the lens was overhead, inches away from the ground, just gliding across this weird sparkly texture. You have no idea where you were - outer space, against the wall, or what. Then it slowly kind of tips up and you see these really big, painted markings and maybe you figure out that it’s a street or you don’t know where or what. But then you see the curb. The camera kind of tilts up and you realize, “This is a street.” You’re outside and you don’t see anyone. The camera keeps gliding and you’re kind of wondering. To me, it makes it feel more engaging. It’s like more of a interactive experience for the audience. They’re actively asking themselves questions as they’re watching this thing. Then the camera gets to the guy’s feet, you see that there’s a guy, you don’t know who he is or what he is or what he’s doing. As the camera comes closer to him, wraps around him in a 360 and tilt up over him, we’re close where you kind of see this image of this metal. You think you see some blood, but it’s kind of dark and his clothes are kind of dark - on purpose - to kind of hide what’s going on. Then not until the middle of the video do we reveal that, with a wide shot, that he’s had a sword sticking to his chest fully. He’s walking down the street and these other people are kind of passing him by, unnoticing his condition. To me, where it takes a turn is when the camera comes back and comes closer to him on a close-up. You see what’s going on behind the scene in his brain or in his heart or in his mind, you see what he’s feeling. That to me, when you see that feeling in his eyes, that’s the climax of the video, that’s the reveal of what I was going for. A lot of people like to write in a three-act structure. To me, in that video, the three-act structure was more of like the visual reveal rather than like setting up a story, hitting a climax and then going through the resolution and it paying off. It was more just the way the camera saw it. If you took out the way the camera moved around in the one take, and the 360 and how they framed it, and you just kind of put it as a wide shot, the action is just a guy walking on the street. He’s not doing anything else. At the very end, something does happen, but pretty much, up until that point, it’s just a very flat performance. There’s nothing going on. So everything happens through the lens of the camera.

Doug: Is all that stuff in the treatment? Like, the camera movements?

Ryan: It didn’t necessarily include the camera move per se, I described how the camera should move in terms of it feeling like it was gliding and floating through the scene. There’s no jittery or stuttery movement on his part, everything’s very light as if he’s floating on his feet and he can’t hold himself up. He’s like dizzy, love struck, really. I didn’t want the audience to be aware of the camera. Even though it was the hardest shot I've ever gotten, I just didn’t want it to feel that way. So, it’s starting off super low and then going 360 around him twice and then ending up in one take wasn’t mapped out in the treatment, but the way it would move and why and how was.

Doug: How many times did you guys run through the action? How many different takes did you get?

Ryan: Casting was a pretty big deal because I wanted an actor who could take a fall. I was actually trying to cast a skateboarder because I needed an actor who could fall on, literally, asphalt. I do have a VFX background, I do have a stunt background, and I was trying to brainstorm with the stunt coordinator, Mindy Kelly, how we could do this and get the most amount of takes out of the actor. At the end of the day, for the shot I wanted, the actor literally just had to eat shit on pure asphalt. We gave him a pad to wear under his clothes, but he just had to tough it out. So that casting was a very thought out, important decision. I thought that the amount of takes we would get would be based on how many times the actor would be able to fall down on the ground. But in reality, what ended up happening is, the amount of takes that we got was based on how tired the steady cam operator got, really. Because we’re using this thing that no one ever uses. It sounds like a holy grail of camera equipment but it’s really a red herring. It’s like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s this thing called an Alien Revolution and what that does is that it lets you go from low mode on a steady cam to high mode in the same shot because there’s a gyro thing that stabilizes the movement of the camera as you move it up. If you had a regular steady cam, if you flipped it from high mode to low mode, it would do a half circle - the horizon line of the frame would change. But with this thing, it keeps the horizon line stable and level and lets you go from low to high. With the steady cam, you have this vest thing on, this harness thing on, and all the weight is locked into your vest. And with this Alien Revolution thing, it’s like a Darth Maul double light saber. It’s like literally a dumbbell in his hands and he has to twist it around, hold up both ends of it which is like forearms and biceps. Going down the street, doing two 360s around this actor, going low mode to high mode, for two minute-long take - every single take, he was panting. The guy was amazing. You could check out his IMDB, he looks exactly like Stone Cold Steve Austin, the wrestler. He’s like this ripped, big dude. After every single take, it sounded like a cross between someone having really gnarly sex and someone dying of exhaustion. It was just so intense. Because what he would do was, he would keep the camera steady at all cost. He didn't care how he ended up, just as long as he got the shot. But in order for him to get the wide shot right in the middle of the take, he had to go 360 around the actor, and then run forward so he can get in place for the short at like two-thirds of the way through the video. We only got nine takes, and the one we used was actually the second to last take. That’s kind of interesting because if you looked in the video, there’s a car in the parking lot and that car is where me and the DP, Ryan Carmody, are sitting behind, looking at the wireless monitor. There’s three dudes who were standing, just kind of lurking in the parking lot - and those three dudes are the owners of that liquor store who literally closed that shop and walked out on the set during our take. So the take had already started and literally everyone was like, “All right guys, this is our last take. We can’t do this anymore!” And they start to walk out and I’m just freaking out. We’re hiding behind their car. There’s two kids with what looks like a TV screen or something, looking, watching something, hiding, leaning up against their cars. If you look in the video, a dude was just staring down at me and all I’m saying to him is, “Don’t look up. Don’t look up. Don't look up.” He doesn’t know why he shouldn’t look up, he doesn’t and none of the other dudes know anything. I’m just saying, “Don’t look up. Don’t look up.” So, I think if you stare, that you could see one of the dudes is actually looking in the camera but he’s soft in focus. Yeah, it was intense. I didn’t even watch the monitor on that take, but that ended up being the best take we got. And because I was so scared that one of those dudes is looking in the monitor, everyone’s like, “All right guys. That was the last take. We got to get going. Chris, the operator cannot do another one." James, the actor, his shoulder was all bruised up and I think he might have been bleeding actually. But I was like, “Guys, those guys were looking in the camera. We have to done more take.” And everyone was like, “Oh, my God. Are you serious? They were looking in the camera?” And I was like, “Yeah, man. There isn’t anything we could do about it. We got to do one more take.” But I had no idea if they were or not. I just was like we really, really need one more take. So if we would’ve ended it on that, we would’ve been good, but we got one more take. It was actually really good operating, but those three dudes actually added like a weird kind of cool atmosphere to the video. And also, the parking lot is super empty because there was no cars on the last one. But yeah, it was a long, very intense process.

Doug: You mentioned a little bit about the casting, that you’ve initially wanted to get a skateboarder because they can take a fall. So eventually, when you did get through the casting process, did you literally just have a bunch of dudes fall for you first of all and see if that would work out?

Ryan: Yeah. I guess every video is different because it’s a varying budget. Some are based on acting, some are just based on a cool camera trick, some are just like graphics. For this video, I just needed to get someone to fall. We need to have a certain look, and they just need to fall. It was such a non-specific casting call that we had so many different people. We actually did it through a casting service and they just thought I was insane. I’d have the dudes walk around - it was in a room too so they maybe can only take like five or six steps before they hit the wall - so I had them stumble back and forth a few times. We had a little blue mat in the middle of the room and then they would fall on the fifth one. As I saw more and more people, I realized that the emotion in the eyes and in the face was really hard to do. No one was able to nail the feeling that I was going for. We auditioned a bunch of people. Mindy worked with these guys who were all in the Hunger Games. They were young kids who played the other American Gladiator people in Hunger Games from the other cities. We auditioned four of those kids so they are legit, sag feature actors. None of them can pull it off. It was in between a younger kid who is from the Hunger Games and the guy we end up going with, James Downing. James’ background was in Military. He was a marine. He was in Afghanistan and he was in the shit. He had missiles shot at him and he was telling us all these gnarly stories from when he was over there. So falling on the asphalt for him was just a day in a life. It wasn’t a big deal at all. On top of that, he nailed the look, he nailed the expression. There was no one else. If we hadn’t found him, it wouldn’t have worked with any of the other people. It just would’ve been a totally different, not in a good way kind of video. Thank God for him.

Doug: You say you saw a bunch of people, how many is a bunch? Since you want to a casting service, that gives me a picture that you went through tons of people.

Ryan: Well, it was just one role. We had hundreds of headshots to looked at and then we narrowed it down to the people that I thought had a halfway decent look. On the day of the casting call where there were people - we actually had a few casting calls - but the big casting call was probably like thirty, forty people. It was a good five hours of dudes falling. The funniest part was the casting director. He’s like this kind of skeezy dude from the valley, operating this late 90s video camera. He’s giving them his direction. It was just a really weird thing.

Doug: What was the process behind making the actual sword?

Ryan: Oh, wow. Yeah, that was a lot crazier than I thought. I come from that DIY skateboarding background so stuff that I think is really doable is actually crazy for normal production people. My original idea was to find a sword that I thought was really cool and I really liked. Then saw it in half and weld it to a bullet-proof vest that had a metal plate somehow secured into it so that it looked as realistic as possible - and that it wouldn’t break or anything. Everyone from my producers, to the production company, to production coordinator thought someone was going to get their arm chopped off. So what we had to do was basically find a sword I liked, and then remanufacture the sword like the way they do it on all the big features. It made of something like epoxy urethane something and they treat it with a specific heat treatment. The process is actually really complicated, but we ended up going that route. What that allowed me to do was design the sword exactly the way I wanted to. I went to maybe three different prop houses and chose, “OK, I like this handle, I like this hilt." I got to pick the blade, the colors, and all that. There’s pros and cons with the way we did it, but we had to manufacture it for safety reasons because no one would let me do it the way I wanted to do it. It’s too crazy.

Doug: That’s a bummer. But I guess safety first is important.

Ryan: Yeah. It would’ve sucked if someone got stabbed or sliced open.

Doug: You mentioned working a lot with your stunt coordinator, Mindy. Was she pretty much with you the whole process, from the time that you realized you were going to work on this project all the way through production?

Ryan: Every director is different. Every director has a different background. But I guess with me, because of my background skateboarding, falling down on the street didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me. Walking around with a sword sticking through, attached to a vest, didn’t sound that crazy to me. It’s all stuff I would do myself without a second thought. It doesn’t occur to me that would be dangerous or there would be any risk or consequences. It just didn’t seem like that big of a deal, but to everyone else it just seemed crazy. So with her, it was kind of like, “All right, this is what I want to do.” And then she’ll just be like, “Ah, yeah. You can’t really do that.” I was like, “Why?” It was weird because she had all these pads. Like in football pants they have like the snap in pads and they have like shoulder pads and stuff like that. She had bunch of different sizes of those and the ones that she thought would be best, made the dude’s pants stick out an extra like six inches so it looked like he was some weird bloated dude like wearing way too tight of jeans. It was like the decision of like, “OK, do we make the actors safe and comfortable so he doesn’t hurt himself when he falls, or do we make it look good and the actor just toughs it out." I don’t know why, I sound like such a jerk on these interviews. On the No video, the actors couldn’t breathe in the dummy masks. I was like, “No, we can’t. There’s no way we can drill holes in these dummy masks because like then, it’s just don’t look right.” We ended up having to figure out a way to do it in a way that I could fix later in post. But for me, it’s suffering whatever you have to suffer until you get that shot. It’s not one of those things where I just fell like actors should do whatever I say and get the shot. It’s like all stuff that if I could be the actor and if I could put myself out there and do it myself, I totally would. Because I'm like that, with all the other aspects of the production of the scene or if something has to be cut or there’s effects that have to be done, I’ll gladly suffer through that in order to make the project what I think it needs to be. I guess it’s, for me, been like a funny realizing that you as the director, you’re the one the cares the most about the project. No matter what people say or what you might think or how much it can benefit them, you’re the one at the end of the day that’s willing to go all the way for. I know, that not just me. It’s pretty much every other director out there. So with Mindy, it was kind of this thing where I would be like, “All right. Well, I want him to fall on the asphalt. I don’t want to see any pads, I don’t want there to be a pad on the ground. We can’t take it out on post. This is how we have to do it.” And she’ll be like, “All right. Well, we can’t do it like that. We have to have all these pads and a few of this.” Then what would end up happening is James would just tough it out. He’d be like, “You know what? Dude, fuck it. I'm going to eat shit on the ground and it’s going to look great and we’re just going to do it.” If we didn’t have James, with his freaking, amazing abilities and attitude, and him being able to put off acting-wise with a subtext, it would have never happened with anyone.

Doug: It seemed like you guys went with the right choice, using the guy who was in the real-life Hunger Games rather than the guy who’s in the movie Hunger Games.

Ryan: Oh, for sure. The thing too is like we’re flirting with the idea of using a celebrity actor since the band is a really popular band. Michelle Williams is in their last video. So I flirted with the idea of trying to get someone who had more of a name, but as soon as all these stunt issues came up, it was just like, there’ll be no one. Unless you got Jackie Chan Jr. or someone, there’s just no one who could fit the bill. It was funny because James is not a big actor. He’s been in some commercials. He’s been actually in some stunt-based commercials with some skateboarding and stuff, but he’s definitely not like Ryan Gosling or Michelle Williams. But maybe half or a third of the post that people did about the video, it had mentioned his name. I was so happy about that because without him, it could not have been anyone else in those shoes.

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.