The Rifle - The Ground dir. Black Sundays (me)

It was my whole goal in life to make music videos for a living. I was doing okay there for a second too, I had something on MTV2 and Fake Four was using me to do bigger indie-rap videos and I had a steady stream of smaller time clients. It was my life dream and I was on my way. I was just waiting for that one with the decent budget that would give me the chance to finally make that truly great piece of work that would attract an agency.

Then some things went wrong, mostly my health but also the fact that the medium of music videos is not nearly what it once was and even the guys I look up to seem to be directing one or two videos a year at most. Good stuff still premieres sometimes but when my Futurecop! video didn’t even get selected for SXSW last year I kind of stopped killing myself in a medium that is on some level basically trying to beg musicians to give you money to make art.

I also had this fantasy that NYC was a hotbed of great music video directors. So many of the guys I respect live here and it’s a lot of why I moved here but I have lived in NYC for a year and whatever scene I imagined seems mostly dried up or I couldn’t find it.

I still think about music videos constantly, and obsessively scour the internet watching every single new video that I can find everyday and analyzing them and taking notes and writing pitches for brilliant masterpieces that rarely make it out of google docs. It’s still what I was put on this earth to do.

I throw together little videos for my friends sometimes. No budget affairs. The Rifle is not only a good friend but a great musician and I threw some little videos together for her awhile ago. This one turned out really good for what it is and although it isn’t gorgeous strippers on an infinite stripper pole in space or Lil’ Debbie smoking giant blunts in slo-mo, I am proud of it on it’s own terms.

This weekend recording with Matt at Midtown Island Studio has been a dream. We set out to record 5 songs and finished 4 in two days! It’s been a crazy exciting awesome experience.  We finally recorded a couple songs we’ve been playing at shows for a while and also polished up a brand new ditty that we can’t wait to share. 

Let’s just take a sweet moment to focus on Randy. Hiiiiiiiii Randy