Sam Pilling

0:19Oh it's kind of scary up here good evening so yes my name is Sam pilling and as you can see I like cats I'm also a director at Pulse films and I'm known for making music videos for artists such as the weekend it's not going to play yes it's not playing the old down key strikes again hey what's really worth it.

0:59But yeah it's good to start you know it's good to start right.

1:04And then it can all up later so Jesus so jcole as well subtract and major laser but today I'm going to talk to you about my latest video for DJ Shadow and run the jewels so I'll play the video and then I'll bore you with the details afterwards hopefully this. Actually works thank ♪

1:47you picture this I'm a bag of dicks put me to your lips I am sick I will punch a baby bear in a give me lip I'm going send you to the yard get a stick make a switch I can end the conversation real I am crack I ain't lying kick a lion in this crack I'm the I will fall off in your crib take a hit your mama on the booty KCK your dog your F dressed up like he s and took pictures with your kids we the best we will cut a frny face in your chest little wench I'm a mention ably fresh I'm a mitch get correct I will walk into a court while it wreck screaming yes I am guilty I am death hey you want to hear a good joke nobody speak nobody get get running St popping your bunions out coming I'm the dumbest who flame throw your to funion Flame your crew quicker than Trump youngest now face the flame your F face Charlie Brown Peppermint Patty lus and Lucy put Co in the doie Ries the smoke with Snoopy I still remain that dick rabbit slacker to SP the wooie cuz the toal other the T of murder you Fring M out of here ♪

3:20yeah nobody speak nobody can't choke hey nobody speak nobody get J hey hey nobody speak nobody speak only facts I will shoot up baby duck if it quack with Aug top feeling come cops and villing it shots is block shipped out and B y'all feeling it LP killing it killing my killing what more can I say we top dilling it Val without our villing it viciously found victory burn towns and Villages burning looting and pillages murderers try to hurt us we curse them and all the CH I just want the bread and baloney bundles to talk away I don't work for free I a barely giving a away so tell begging Johnny and Mommy they get the away yo here's a gun son now run get it the G away live to shoot another ♪

4:29day nobody speak nobody get choke nobody speak nobody can't J hey nobody speak nobody speak nobody speak nobody get [Applause]

5:09[Applause]

5:23so so the idea for the video kind of came about because of this guy ah well.

5:30Actually it was because of killer Mike's hilarious lyrics about him and for those that don't know what Killer Mike is referencing it's this amazing bit of footage where Trump talks about parenting I don't think Ivanka would do that inside the magazine although she does have a very nice figure I've said that if Ivanka weren't my daughter perhaps I'd be dating her you know oh it's so weird so ah so the combination of these lyrics and the kind of battle rap nature of the track got me thinking wouldn't it be funny if rat battles didn't look like this.

6:10But they look like this.

6:12And in fact the more I thought about it the more it seemed like political debates are actually quite similar to rap battles you know politicians go head-to-head trying to verbally assault and outwit each other using overly clever and complicated words and then. I thought what if it didn't stop with words and of course truth is always stranger than fiction and after a quick Google search I found several examples of politicians beating the crap out of each other from all over the world this particular one's from turkey and it obviously goes on so thankfully Shadow M canel all love the idea for the video so the next bit was kind of working out how we're actually going to make it happen so I cut together a little mood film to basically share everybody give them a rough idea of what the video might look like little W I'm fresh I'm a mitch get correct I will walk into a court while they wreck screaming yes I your guilty of chat hey you want to hear a good joke nobody speak nobody get [Applause]

7:40choked so making a move film was was actually an invaluable part of the production process because it.

7:47Basically meant that I could kind of work out where the story beats were going to be what shots I needed how long each kind of moment or scene was going to last and how it would all relate to the music and that obviously informed the shot list that I wrote as it gave me a clear idea of what I needed to shoot yet it still didn't stop me writing over 40 shots for a one day shoot which you know so from a visual perspective House of Cards was obviously a big influence and it's a great example of slick cinematography great art Direction and obviously great acting I was also influenced by the kind of muted gray blue color palette of a lot of Roy Anderson's films now I've always loved the famous climax in Sergio Leon The Good the Bad and the Ugly and maybe because the track has a kind of almost like cowboy guitar Rift to it I really wanted my two political leaders to be filmed in a similar close-up way. And it really kind of emphasizes the tension between them right before it all kind of kicks off.

8:56So I started researching the way that fights scenes have been handled in different films over the years taking inspiration from all sorts of films from Mean Streets 300 and even the recent Kingsmen got a look in as well.

9:16And I wanted the wider shots to have quite a grand kind of Tableau feeling to them like old Renaissance paintings unfortunately it's impossible to compete with the Masters but we we sort of tried our best to give the scenes a really kind of like soft painterly feel with the lighting another reference was obviously George Orwell's Animal Farm and the rather memorable episode of Black Mirror where the Prime Minister has to get involved with the pig so the animals felt like an important part of the idea. Basically to sort of help show that this like once formal normal situation that got completely out of hand and become a complete show and a complete circus I liked the chickens as a kind of way of subverting the well-known image of like the beautiful elegant flying Dove of Peace you know the poor chickens flapping about wildly not quite flying and definitely not bringing any peace so it felt like a nice kind of you to peace in a weird way for the end I thought it'd be funny if the American politician was was attacked with his own flag and I kind of wanted this moment to hint at the famous photograph of the American troops raising the flag in ioa and then this more shocking image from the Boston bus riots in the 7s so because the entire video was going to be set in one room the location was kind of key and what we were trying to do was basically recreate a United Nations meeting room which which is not really an easy task especially on a music video budget so we decided to film the video in Kiev there it is there on the map basically because it has lots of old Soviet buildings that are Grand and ornate but also kind of like slightly drab and haven't really been sort of kept up very well.

11:18So I'd seen this old location of what is known as Ukraine Dom or Ukraine house and it looked like it could be a great option except it didn't have any tables or chairs so thankfully this location which was another location in KB that we scouted they let us use theirs for an undisclosed fee and I did a little mockup to see what the Finish space might look like thankfully thanks to Sergey the amazing production designer it looked a lot better than my mockup so so the next section the next kind of thing was casting so we could only afford 14 principles and in order to get like a good mix and a good balance between like Great Performances but also great fight sequences we use a combination of actors and stunt actors we kind of just assigned Flags to them to kind of basically we're shooting in Ukraine there's obviously an issue that we thought that maybe everybody would look very Ukrainian so we wanted to make sure that.

12:29There was actually enough diversity within the lead actors and that nobody was going to sort of yeah. So that was we that was kind of a just to make sure it was all okay.

12:39So we had an extensive cast process and we got some really really great actors this guy Ole absolute Legend however needless to say rapping whilst acting is not an easy task and it's difficult enough if English is your first language let alone your second second or third bit is this I'm a back of a dick putting it to your lips I am sink I punch and baby be in his give me a lips I'mma send you to the yard get a STI make switch I can decoration a qu S I mean they they're they're trying I mean it's not easy right but but thankfully we met ehor who had an amazing look was a great actor and he spoke great English because he' actually studied acting in England and America however he was so good that we actually had to fly somebody in from England last minute to to play his political opposition picture this I'm a bag of dicks put me to your lips I am sick I will punch a baby bear on this give me lip I'm going send you to the yard get a stick make a switch I can end the conversation real quick yeah fall up in your crib pet your mama on the booty kick your dog your fat boy dressed up like you Sant and pictures so so we had a rehearsal day before the shoot where I basically spent the morning working with with Ian and ehor going through the lyrics and then sort of going through the particular like story beats just the different emotions and running through all that.

14:27And then in the afternoon we worked with our St coordinator Ilia planning out the various fight [Applause]

14:35[Applause]

14:46scenes so after all that we actually had to film it and one of the biggest considerations was the lighting it's a huge space and anybody that sort of does any kind of camera work we'll know that to light that is is relatively difficult so because time was tight we knew that using a balloon light was the best approach so that we weren't constantly moving light stands in and out of shot for like the close moments or the wide moments and then David the Director of Photography had the great idea of using wires so that we could kind of shimmy the balloon into different places relatively quickly to shape the light for like different close-up moments there he is there waiting so it wasn't that quick but you know we got it up there.

15:34And in position however it was a long day and as you can see people took any opportunity they could to have a little kit. And it was you know I don't blame them.

15:46This is mid take and there's at least three people asleep not to mention the focus pillar who was who was also asleep this guy's taking a picture of of his mate who's asleep and even our lead actor was getting in on it.

16:06So the reason for all the Sleeping was the lip syn and despite our actor's best efforts both of them experienced a few difficulties in in the tongue twisting lyrics we had to do several takes to get it right the the number will remain unknown but we made a makeshift teleprompter to help our actors out.

16:28And I'm pretty sure that that bloke over there is also asleep he enough so again because of the time restrictions we had to limit the number of Dolly tracks that we laid in order to get movement on the shots so we positioned two pieces of track in a sort of t-shape so that we could easily sort of lift the dolly off and switch between pushings and and kind of sideways tracks so we actually had to build this platform out over the steps and the reason was to get the sort of the Epic wide the opening shot and all the kind of wide stuff of the fighting we were on like an 18 mil lens it was it was the the widest lens we had and the stairs it just wasn't going to cut it.

17:25So we had to bring it all the way back to get the wide but the advantage of our of our sideways track was it meant that we could swing to a long lens and pick up the the arguing sections of our where our politicians are arguing and then we could come onto a wider lens basically without moving the track and capture wider shots of of the fighting so we kind of had to think like tactically with with what we were doing there he is there o having a good leap so after filming the wide shots we filmed like the individual sort of scenes or moments within the fight handheld so that we could get right in there as sort of feeling like we're part of the action really and thanks to the rehearsal day with Ilia these fight sequences were actually sort of Fairly painless for everybody involved however the animal moments were slightly more tricky and in the industry this technique is known as the chicken [Applause]

18:34sauce pretty pretty good pretty good pretty good so it's about 3:00 in the morning when we wrapped luckily we found a local 24-hour bar and had a well-deserved drink or six and then we flew straight back to London and spent a week in a dark edit Suite cutting the video together which basically brings me on to the final slide film making is like an amazingly collaborative process and takes many people's trust dedication hard work and talent just to make one video so without all of these people and probably many many more the video Simply wouldn't have been able to happen so in particular I'd like to thank Alene McAn David Proctor Sarah Park Sarah bman James sorton Marissa Clifford and the pigs [Applause]