2. CORENELL – KEEP ON JUMPIN’

Corenell – Keep on jumping from Robin Schmidt on Vimeo.

This video is easily the most watched piece of work I’ve ever made. I just did a quick check on Youtube and I’ve probably logged near on 1.5 million views. It’s not hard to see why it’s done well. Pretty simple proposition: Blondes play Brunettes at a football, in their pants, in the mud. But how did it all come about?

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about how the music video industry works but in a nutshell it’s this: Record labels approach production companies with briefs for tracks, accompanied by a budget. The production companies represent directors and these directors then write treatments for videos based on the brief, their own ideas and what’s possible for the money (which is a completely moveable feast and often doesn’t translate at all to what’s on the screen, both positively and negatively). You’re in a highly competitive environment, fighting with up to ten other directors for the job. It’s vicious, there’s no loyalty, production companies will incentivise record labels by pumping in their own cash, so directors can get prestige jobs, directors will offer to waive their fee for the same reason. In other words, it’s a shark fest.

Before the mud

This track was commissioned by Gut Records, now no longer in existence. Gut were known at the time for one off novelty comebacks like Right Said Fred, or dance tracks but without the clout of Ministry. So, while Benny Benassi was heavily supported, and did really well, my video came behind that one and didn’t receive anywhere near the amount of support simply because it wasn’t financially possible. In 2007 the airwaves were absolutely rammed with ‘sexy’ videos. We had girls doing aerobics, girls with power tools, girls using photocopiers and god knows what else, but tons of sexploitation vids. Mine was actually one of the very last to be made as the trend moved on and it just wasn’t cool anymore. So: here is the brief I received…

Corenell  -   listening to the track makes me feel that extreme sports would work well with the lyrics, it would be great to put footage together of snowboarders, Kite surfers, extreme skiers, skateboarder, BMX etc.  And it’s always sexier when you have sexy girls doing any extreme sports in as little clothing as possible.

Okay then… Budget £12k. I basically looked at the world and said ‘What do young males like?’ Answer: football and girls. Why not combine them. Okay. But what really sold it was finding a series of photos of Japanes girls playing football in the mud. That basically became the inspiration for the treatment. That series was really dark and stylish, but that would never have worked for our video so I turned it into a supid blondes versus brunettes slugfest. So, here then is a link to my treatment, as I desperately tried to come up with something that would win me the job. And win me the job it did. Which is where all the fun starts. First step, a meeting with the record label. We sit down and spend the next half hour being interrogated, at great length on every single detail of how we’re going to achieve what’s in the treatment. Not only that, we’re left in no doubt that if we don’t achieve a ‘sunny, summery video with hot girls, no mingers’ we wouldn’t get paid. Summery, sunny… it’s early April. The chances of a sunny day are not good. And that’s when the pressure started bearing down on me.

Producer Joel praises the sun gods

I handle pressure really well, in fact, put me under extreme pressure, with insane deadlines and no room for error and I become super calm, smashing through whatever needs doing at warp speed. I thrive under horrible pressure. Not this time. It got to me really really badly. I think it was a combination of several things: this potentially being my big break in music videos, the weight of the record label, the need for the video to live up to the standard set by the other sexploitation videos doing the rounds at the time, and of course my own head. I’ve never felt pressure quite like that, or succumbed to it since, though the 14 Islands Film Challenge project put me through the wringer in ways I really wasn’t expecting! My own head is a vicious and unhelpful beast sometimes and the standards I set for myself are very often impractical and unhealthy. That’s just who I am though.

Pressure induces can consumption

First step, casting. Oh dear god. We were looking for ten girls (most sexploitation videos have a maximum of five, models and makeup are expensive) and I will never forget the casting day when we had models literally everywhere around the office, you couldn’t move. I auditioned some pretty famous glamour models and didn’t cast them (though I did cast Lauren Pope), which in hindsight was probably a mistake, because they would have worked better for selling the video later on. Never mind. We had to see people in their bikinis because that’s how they would be on camera but after the first couple of people we chickened out and didn’t do that, which we should have done in some instances. We were just too embarassed and felt too pervy to ask people that. Go figure. I learned a big lesson that day, which was always film people in castings because how they are on camera has nothing to do with how they are in the flesh. Our lead brunette, Bianca Deacy was almost ditched because I didn’t think she had much going on, but seeing her on camera it suddenly all made sense. It took us a very long time to get our ten girls together and we had many many repeat castings before we finally had them. I stuck their pictures up on my wall and tried to imagine them all as a team and it all felt pretty good.

Next job, the mud. You might think it would be easy to find a mudbath in London, but you’d be absolutely wrong. We also needed a place with changing rooms and the kind of slightly degraded aesthetic I was looking for. As fate would have it London Welsh rugby club in Richmond had a training pitch that was all cut up and muddy that they said we could wet down, and it also had the changing rooms, but man we had to work for that.

Production day, it dawns sunny, would you believe it? Well, sunny ish! We had three makeup artists going great guns all day trying to make these girls as beautiful as possible. And they did us proud.

Just let em run...

Our first shots were in the changing room and involved our models posing sexily doing stretches. Okay. Then I lose the plot in a really major way. I was standing there with the label commissioner standing right behind me, analysing every single shot, literally breathing down my neck and I lost it. What I should have done is buy a book on model poses, worked out exactly which ones I wanted and just gone with that. But I didn’t, I tried to create them all out of my own head, and I just had no ideas on set. I’d never done any kind of glamour/beauty work before and though I was absolutely confident in my ideas with the action, those poses just freaked me out. I didn’t let anyone know but I was completely numb and just didn’t do a very good job. Looking back at it I could have been so much more creative with what I did, but so be it.

This is my job

We’d shot probably an hour and a half, when suddenly Lauren Pope pipes up with a question: will this be sold on the internet? Answer, yes. Uh oh, cue an irate glamour model walking off set and having a strop. We’re now one blonde down and we’ve shot an hour where you need to see them all. Great. Our producer, Joel, got on the phone and someone somewhere found us a replacement and we just had to keep shooting until she turned up. If you look at the shots of the blondes running you’ll notice there’s only four compared to the brunettes’ five. Next problem, the rugby club refused to let us wet down the training pitch. These things happen all the time on shoots but I was just in such a crap place on this job that I was starting to really panic. Again, producer Joel managed to get them to come round and we were on. Time schedules are always problematic on promo shoots and this one was no exception. I had all these incredibly stylised shots of girls playing football planned but when it came to it we only had an hour to shoot all the game stuff. Thankfully we had a steadicam op who was able to cover off a whole ton of stuff in a very short space of time to get us through the necessary coverage in time. The girls were so game it was insane. It was freezing cold and they were there in their pants, charging at each other, sliding through mud, not complaining. Kudos.

Lucky ref....

Final setups were in the shower and here I was finally able to relax and enjoy the process. People always tell me what a lucky git I am for shooting that video but this was the only moment I was able to feel anything vaguely resembling lucky. A number of the girls didn’t want to do the shower stuff but our mains did and when we wrapped one of the stripped completely naked in front of us and showered off all the mud. Once we’d picked our tongues off the floor I was able to reflect on what had been a very stressful shoot and vow to myself never again to get that freaked out.

The commissioner strokes his beard, stresses me out

We’d shot on 16mm and the stuff looked great. The edit was actually pretty straightforward, the record label loved it and for once that whole process was actually fairly painless. Once we got into the grade it got even more fun. Our colourist did a great job making the girls look really hot, subtly defocussing skin and changing the colour of the walls in the changing room. The video got a lot of coverage in the papers and there’s even a pastiche video of it, which I’m particularly proud of! It’s still being watched by thousands of people and it’s funny how that stupid concept did so well. I learned a huge amount and I’ve never been that freaked out since. No idea what happened, but I guess sometimes pressure does weird things.