Music Videos Make me Happy- this one’s for Telefauna

Believe it or not, our plan to get folks to make a music video in 24hrs and to have the bands that wrote the songs used for the video do the judging in a short three hour period between when those video got made and when the videos were to be screened at the show the bands played came off without a hitch! (whew!) Of the 13 teams that set out on this long winded adventure, 12 made it back with a video!

The contestants were in that wide and vivid range between amateur and professional videographer, and every single piece showed smarts, wit and skill.

The Telefauna video elicited some tough contenders, so for this post I’ll just focus on them. Francis T. from the collective called “This Is Not Design” submitted an intensely detailed and perfectly rhythmic psychedelic video. If this song and video had come on in combination at a club there would have been a happy frenzy of dance moves- the combo was frantic, frenetic, and colorful, and the talking suits doing the chorus were funny and cool. An obvious high tech pro.

Ted Kulczyky’s entry suffered from a late night time code problem that may have happened somewhere in the transfer from vhs to digital. This video had me yelling about how smart the man is though, because the timing was still close enough that you could see what the relationships would have been between the song and the visuals. If I had seen it working it might well have been my favorite- I love the look and nostalgia of amateur video, and Ted K edited together great clips of him and his wife, Serah of Worn Fashion Journal, and all their friends in a house in NY singing karaoke right at the camera. The timing and rhythm were carefully adjusted to make the footage feel slightly unreal- like a memory matched to a song about whether you’ll remember to “write this message on my tombstone”. Sweet resonance with the song, and with the whole 24hr project, sweet piece generally from this fine local book dealer and dj.

Martin Reisch and Lara Kaluza made a beautiful, lush, bright, sweet video that managed to balance an air of craft and simplicity and wit against obvious tech chops. The whole video is a simple story- a girl walks in the sun along a street with her goldfish in a bowl. And the videographer spends enough time with this that you think about what lovely, dear, unpredictable things people are, and how beautiful a girl in a dress and a goldfish in a bowl are on a sunny Montreal street. The story unfolds as it must, I suppose, with a cute hipster boy and his cute black fish in a bowl who come along just in time to save the day for the near-dehydrated goldie. This video won a lot of extra points by being submitted in a custom designed DVD case which even included the Indyish logo on it. C’mon. That’s amazing.

All of these were so great it’s hard to imagine there could be one even better suited to the furry joyful synthy funk that is Telefauna, but when folks who’ve loved your music from the beginning and who’ve been to like all your shows come out to compete they are pretty much an undeniable force to be reckoned with.

The winning team, called Team Name, consisted of Julian Siaghail, Michael McCarthy, Louise Bauer, Jason Hendrik, Pierric Soucey and Eric Silverman. First of all - they had big animal head costumes, and flowers tucked in their pants, and they drew in chalk and played in a schoolyard until they got taxed by a fellow in a giant creepy bunny head. They told the whole story of the song in their own way, but they got it right exactly, and the shots were still really nicely framed, and the editing worked with the beats and crazy loops of rhythm so well it was like they knew this music from the cradle (which would make for an intense but awesome nursery situation). My favorite bit had the footage running in slightly slowed reverse with the frolicky performers in the Telefauna heads leaping backwards away from a parade of serious-ish looking men, shot down among the pride festivities that happily coincided with our Indyish weekend. I also really liked the cuts to the yellow remote control jeep. It just worked. At the show on Sunday it had us all laughing and cheering, just like a great Telefauna song, and when the video makers got to talk for a minute with Ian from Telefauna, and I got to stick in what he’d just said about why he’d loved what they made and how it was over-the-top perfect for them, I may have been violently beaming. This is one of the moments I’m proudest to have been a part of in the weekend.

The video making had this violently beaming affect on me repeatedly, so I’ll sit down and tell you more about them soon. And remember - you can come see them all at the Screening this weekend at the Acting Studio of Montreal.