also from July:

FILMING THE IWSNT MUSIC VIDEO

here’s the general tag

The P!ATD guys talked about their plans for their first music video throughout the fall tours in 2005. In early October they were thinking of maybe picking IWSNT. Then they met with Shane Drake in late October while the Nintendo Fusion Tour was in LA.

They filmed the actual video in December 2005. The band was in southern California that month for a string of headlining shows (just for reference: this was about 4 months after the band played their first show ever). The video was done in a 20 hour shoot in Santa Clarita near LA... they had to film it all in one day because of their low budget. The budget for the video was 3x bigger than the recording budget for AFYCSO (which isn’t saying much ha. it was still really small).

This was the first time we’d seen what the band really wanted to do, since they’d been limited by small opening sets or low-budget shows so far. Brendon’s performance in this video kind of set the tone for 2006. It sounded like the cast & crew of the video were impressed with him. Shane said: 

“I was really surprised at how confident and secure Brendon was onstage. That is what’s rare. A lot of musicians are used to being on a stage for a show, but they’re not used to being in front of a camera. You know, it takes a few videos usually to get them used to that notion and that feeling and that energy. And from the first take – literally from the first take – he was a star.”

Daniel Isaac played the groom. Fans were literally obsessed with him when the video came out. He was Shane's intern who did these storyboards for the video.

This shoot is where the band first worked with the Lucent Dossier performers, like Roger Fojas and Dream Rockwell. A guy who was on another video set with Shane had a friend who was connected to the local Lucent Dossier vaudeville troupe, so that’s how P!ATD ended up hearing about them. Dream Rockwell from Lucent Dossier said that Shane "sent us I Write Sins Not Tragedies and I listened to the song and was like ‘wow! ok this is really interesting.’ It brought back kind of Queen… but it was brand new and fresh at the same time.” Dream said that Brendon and Ryan spent most of the day hanging out with the Lucent Dossier performers when they could.

Brendon & Ryan both had the flu while filming. You can tell in the behind-the-scenes video that was filmed by The Punk Video Guys, which was posted on Decaydance’s myspace & the FBR site on January 10th:

The IWSNT video used the same house that was in The Devil’s Rejects. The band wanted to have a lot more fire in the video than restrictions would allow (tbh that became a theme for Brendon & Spencer in the pre-split years lol). Ryan was allowed to keep his costume but Brendon couldn’t keep his. A fan won Brendon’s cane in one of FBR’s spring 2006 contests.

It seemed like the main thing people mentioned about the shoot was how incredibly cold they were. Dream Rockwell said:

“I think we brought 17 [performers]… it was freezing and we’re all in these skimpy little outfits… I had a pink wig on and it was like thank goodness for the wigs cuz they were like keeping our heads warm because it was so cold. And we would grab all these blankets and snuggle up and then when it would come to shoot we would pull them all off and we’d act like ‘oh it’s summertime and it’s so beautiful.’ It was cold!”

Shane said “People were in pain, because most of them were just wearing tights. We tried to keep the band as warm as possible, but basically they were just sitting in their van with the heat cranked all the way up. And Brendon suffered the worst, because he's in the video the most.” 

The performers basically got drunk to stay warm lol. Shane told MTV: “I didn't realize it until we were done filming — but half of the bride's side of the wedding is completely drunk in the video.” 

MORE ABOUT SHANE DRAKE

I thought Shane was a great director for the young group to work with over the years because he seemed to understand them as a band and as people, matched their energy, and pushed their creative vision even further. He was also pretty perceptive and knew what each guy brought to the group. Shane said:

“Brendon was very go-with-the-flow but also kind of zany. You could tell he was the charismatic one that wasn’t necessarily, you know – the first decision maker, but definitely someone who was going to set the pace for how the band appeared and how their energy was perceived.”

Shane also said that it was clear that Spencer and Ryan were the vocal points for the band and had given a lot of thought to what they did & didn’t want to be. (Spencer was also the one who communicated with Shane on behalf of the band for the BIBIYD video next spring). Shane talked about how the guys were really particular about their image overall, so that carried over to the video. Here are a couple other relevant interview quotes:

Ryan to OnMilwaukee in 2007: "We're very hands-on. We got a lot of standard video treatments that every director writes for every rock band -- you know, the standard videos in a warehouse, the storylines interjected by performance shots. We're not interested in doing that. We wanted to try and make it worth it to watch our videos.” 

Spencer in a mid-October 2005 interview: “It’s the same thing, like with our album artwork and t-shirt designs. A lot of the time we’ll tell people an idea and they’ll give us back something. Then, we’re like, ‘Well, you have to change this, this, this, and this.’ So it basically ends up being us doing it all ourselves, only using their like – skills to do it. So I think if we did a video, it would be close to 100 percent our idea.” 

Shane talked to MTV about meeting with P!ATD in late October 2005:

“I sat down with the band and we ran through five or six ideas over a few hours — but honestly, I can't recall what any of them were. Like I said, we were there for a few hours, and I was drinking a bit. Needless to say, I got totally wasted… The whole idea just came to me like a lightning bolt, and I turned to the band and said, 'Here it is: We're going to do a wedding where the bride's side is made up of creepy, face-painted people, and the groom's side is all carnival vaudeville freaks. And Brendon plays the part of the groom's subconscious.’ They all sort of looked at me, so I said, 'Look, it's got stilts, brides crying, and infidelity. It's perfect.' And they were totally sold. Then I got even more trashed and pitched it to the label.”

Spencer talked about that same meeting during an August 2006 interview:

“We were playing a show in Los Angeles and we had a meeting with Shane Drake – the director. It was the first time we’d ever met him and the whole point of the meeting was we’re just gonna sit down and talk and see if he was somebody that we’d wanna work with. The whole point wasn’t really to come up with a concept, but we got there, we started talking, we kind of realized that we shared a lot of similar thoughts on what we wanted the video to be. And within a couple hours of talking, we pretty much came up with the general entire concept for the video. I mean, all the little details were figured out later, but it was a mixture between him knowing what was possible for the video and us kind of with the creative ideas of knowing what we wanted, what we didn’t want, and then getting this concept that was just kind of different than anything we’d ever seen before and really being excited about that and then just growing from there. It was exciting – for our first video I don’t think we could’ve asked for a better experience.” 

Shane said the band “wanted an idea that tied into the lyrics but wasn’t a literal translation.” They tossed around a few ideas and most had something to do with putting a wedding in a surreal world where two very different families were turned into caricatures. The bride’s conservative & stuffy family had closed eyes that appeared to be open, while the groom’s family of free spirits were played by Lucent Dossier performers.

JANUARY 2006

Some IWSNT shoot pictures were up on the FBR buzznet by the end of December, and then more were added in early January (that's where most of the pics at the top of this post came from).

The actual release of the music video felt kind of chaotic to me because it was being passed around online in mid-January, despite not being officially released. Then people in Europe were saying that they saw it on tv? So a ton of fans had already seen the video by the time the band did a walk-on on TRL on the 17th, where a short clip of the video was shown. On January 20th MTV2 played the video every hour. So there was no like one exciting moment for the fandom.

It’s funny looking back now, because a lot of fans weren’t very impressed in January (even though they were soon obsessed with Daniel Isaac). I think I liked the video, but it was so different from the concept of the band that I’d formed based on their low-budget shows so far that it took me a few days to adjust. But so many other fans were let down, or kept saying dismissive stuff like “well it is their first video” or they blamed the director for making it boring or all about Brendon or scary.

I guess at that point it felt like a neat video, but there were so many other new & exciting things going on that it wasn’t anywhere close to being the kind defining event that it would become after the VMAs. That’s not to say that the video didn’t become huge this spring! A LOT of people were introduced to the band through the IWSNT video. It was fun to watch the video climb the rankings on various sites (like it was in the top 10 videos on Yahoo Music in March). I’m just saying that some fans who had already been following the band didn’t view the IWSNT video as such a Big Deal until the VMAs turned it into one. There was a ton of new stuff rapidly unfolding this season, and the video blended into all of that.

THIS WAS THE FIRST SINGLE

IWSNT was the band’s first official single. Several of P!ATD’s songs had been on the radio in 2005 even though those weren’t singles. The Only Difference was the first full song that the band’s marketing team posted on purevolume in early August while they were gradually posting new songs leading up to the album’s release. So that had been on the radio, but so had London Beckoned and even some of the demos (fans were calling in and demanding P!ATD so much that a few stations started playing whatever they could find). The band referred to IWSNT as their first single during a lot of interviews, and that was the hype around it in January 2006. Here’s part of a Big Cheese interview from that time that talks about why IWSNT was chosen: