Hip Hop videos are rich with tradition. Whether it’s rap hands, mean mugging, or random dudes everywhere, there are music video elements that have appeared in every era of hip hop. In the video for "Hive" by Earl Sweatshirt, director Hiro Murai takes some of those traditional hip hop elements and puts his and Odd Future's spin on them. A "cousin" to Hiro and Earl’s pervious collaboration "Chum," "Hive" creates the type of atmosphere that far from traditional in hip hop right now. We talked to Hiro about "Hive," how it relates to "Chum," and about making he and Odd Future’s version of a Wu-Tang video. (Photos by Joyce Kim)

Doug: This video has a similar tone to "Chum," there are a lot of shared elements between them, and some of the monster faces appear in the first video. Would you consider the two videos to be related?

Hiro: I think of "Chum" like a dream that someone from "Hive" would have. They both live in similarly surreal worlds, but "Chum" is a little slipperier and fantastical to me. "Hive" is a little more textured and grounded. They're similar in structure too. They're both twisted versions of some kind of traditional Hip Hop video conventions that I used watch growing up. I think of "Hive" like a bizarro version of those old Wu-Tang posse cut videos, where each rapper would perform surrounded by a mob of random people - all mean mugging the camera. And everything is shot with a grimy 8mm camera and a flashlight. I wanted to do my / Odd Future's version of that aesthetic.

Doug: Clearly the videos are dark, but would you call them scary?

Hiro: I wanted both of the Earl videos to feel tonally ambiguous and sort of amorphous. They're both "dark," but there's something sort of matter-of-fact about the presentation that makes them approachable, or even funny - to me at least. The content can be dark, or surreal, or funny, but the goal was to present it in the driest, most deadpan way possible. So my hope is that the video feels like an ambiguous dream, rather than anything absolute.

Doug: Did you pull any inspiration from the monster characters in “It’s Only Life” for this video?

Hiro: Yea, kind of. I liked the idea of doing something with creature design again. But the monsters in the Shins' video were more based on creatures in Miyazaki movies. For "Hive," Erin O'Donnell (who built the masks) and I looked at children's Halloween costumes from the 40s as reference. They're all really crudely done masks, but there was something really off-putting about how uneven they were.

Doug: Were those faces and hands done practically for the most part, with masks and gloves?

Hiro: Almost everything about the creatures were done practically. Which was great, but I realized on the day that we were asking actors to ride BMX bikes in the dark wearing giant paper mache masks while blinding them with the camera mounted lights. Nothing bad happened thankfully.

Doug: Who is playing the monsters?

Hiro: Some of them were actors, others were pro BMX guys that we'd used before when we did the Grammy video for Frank Ocean.

Doug: You mentioned to me that this video came out only a few hours after you delivered it. Did you know you were working with such a short turnaround time?

Hiro: We were still coloring and doing finishing touches on FX on Monday, but I heard that they were looking to premiere it that night. I didn't really believe them because videos never turn around that fast, but sure enough as soon as we delivered, I started seeing Earl and Tyler tweet about it. It was sort of refreshing.

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.