The Best Thing I've Ever Made
Behind the creation of The Young Sires Music video for 'Interstella'.
I’ve just completed what I think is the best thing I’ve ever created.
I present to you…
To explain how we got here I’m gonna back up a bit.
The last music video I made for The Young Sires was in 2022. At that time it was the biggest video project I’d taken on to date and it was sooooooo much work. Mainly rendering. The amount of time I spent at my computer putting it together was, to me, outrageous and left me completely burnt out. Little did I know that this was just a taste of what was to come.
Because of the burnout mixed with the fact that, to this day, the video only has 5k views, I just completely avoided making another music video for the next two years.
To be perfectly honest, if it was up to me I probably wouldn’t have even made this video BUT when the idea came to me it just felt like I had to make it. I don’t know how to describe it other than that. I can’t say I wasn’t excited but I also felt like I just got tasked with something that was beyond my means and abilities.
What was originally the opening scene in the music video actually represents me getting the idea for the video itself. (More on this later)
The idea came to me sometime in September 2023 when we were about 10 months into living in LA. I had recently been reflecting on the concept of ideas themselves and where they come from and the various experiences associated with receiving and executing them. This also came on the tail of me reading ‘The War of Art’ which purports the idea of “the muse” which is the idea that there are spirits that bring you ideas.
This formed the basis of the concept for the music video. Especially because when the idea initially came to me I was lying in bed and it hit me literally like lightning. Believe me when I tell you that I saw this in my head clear as day and, to me, it was so dope I just had to make it. No choice. So off I went…
Luckily, right at this time I had also just seen ‘The Creator’ in theaters and it blew me away. I started watching every behind the scenes video I could find. One of the things that the director talks about is how they used new and innovative VFX techniques to make a 200 million dollar movie for about 80 Million.
Essentially by just questioning the status quo they were able to find a whole new approach to making a sci-fi movie.
At some point I just had an epiphany and realized I could do this exact same thing on a much smaller scale.
What’s crazy is that this one realization increased my video creation ability by a larger margin than any other single thing previously. More than new gear, more than new software, and more than learning new skills.
Literally just a mindset shift and a fundamental change in the way I approach creativity unlocked most of what made this video possible.
I used to just think “Oh we can’t do that type of scene or shot cause it’s too expensive or I don’t have the right gear” etc.. but now I’ve realized that there are endless ways to cheat and get close if you just open your mind a little bit.
I’ll give you a quick example from ‘The Creator’ that really stuck with me..
Gareth Edwards (the director) talked about needing a shot of the inside of an ambulance as it crashes and flips over. Normally this would be very expensive because you would have to rig the cabin on a big hydraulic system that spins it and get stunt actors etc.. the whole nine yards.
Instead of doing that.. He just had the actor fling himself against the wall while someone else threw a bunch of paper and debris in the cabin and Gareth just… spun the camera in his hands.. so it looked like the ambulance was flipping… and it looks great.. you could never tell the difference in a million years.
So, armed with this new perspective, we set off on our journey of making our music video for Interstella.
At this point I’d also been using MidJourney A.I. and was planning on trying to find ways to implement A.I. art into the video and take advantage of the amazing new tools that were becoming rapidly accessible.
It turns out that the main way I would use A.I. was to generate reference images and then build 3D sets based on them. This way I could look at the lighting, reflections, perspective etc.. and have a baseline to go off of.
For example, below are the references for Benn’s performance stage in the video..
And this is the stage that I built…
Another way I implemented A.I. into my workflow was by generating background plates for some of the shots. I could generate an image, edit and adjust it to my liking and then put 3D objects or the subject in the foreground and after some compositing and effects it looked awesome.
The entire video was shot on a green screen in our garage and rendered on my Mac Studio in my room. I knew we would be shooting for multiple months so we first developed a cheap and versatile lighting system that was super easy to set up and tear down and also semi-permanently installed a green screen that just stayed in the garage and could roll up and clip into the rafters when we weren’t using it.
Since my brother Spence had a bunch of experience with this type of thing from his job, I put him in charge of the set and he handled most of that side of things. Looking back, having this setup dialed-in and thought-out was a super critical aspect of the video because with green screen you basically live and die by lighting in order to make shots seem believable.
Because I didn’t really know what I was doing, we had to do a lot of testing and I was constantly shooting something and then taking it back to my computer and seeing how it would look in the 3D set that I’d built in after effects. So, we eventually just set up a computer screen out in the garage and I would just work out there while we were shooting.
As far as wardrobe/fashion goes.. it’s really not my forte. Luckily, it’s my other brother Benn’s forte so I put him in charge of that.
All in all I think the video ended up costing around $4000 but most of that went to wardrobe and $1200 of that just went to our shoes.
Benn also had the idea of using a photo of our outfits as the texture of some of the objects in one of the scenes and it turned out to be super cool and totally worth it in my opinion.
The biggest expense after wardrobe was all the 3D models. In the video you will notice the presence of all these cool abstract objects. These represent our ideas.
Simply put “Interstella” represents the Universe or God.. or in our conception, the source… where ideas come from… She (Interstella) sends us ideas and the video aims to represent the various ways that we wrestle, interact with and experience those ideas.
Sometimes executing creative ideas is easy and everything moves naturally but other times it’s like wrestling a bear. Hence the text at the beginning of the video..
To a certain degree, as creatives, we’ve oriented our lives around this endeavor of bringing our creative vision into the world and there are a lot of different ways to think about that and what it even means. This video is just an exploration of one of those ways.
The chaotic and mysterious nature of the video is not an accident and is often how life as a creative person feels… at least for me. I wanted to give the viewer a taste of that.
Another aspect of the creative endeavor that we experienced while making this video was the fact that sometimes you only get partial ideas or partial downloads. Sometimes you just get the seed of an idea and how it ends up growing is up to you.
Midway through the video shoot, Benn was working on a remix for Interstella that we were going to release after the video came out. We would have shoot-days where there would be a lot of downtime for him on set and he would just produce on his laptop. The remix version of the song ended up being so sick that we just decided to switch gears and edit the music video to the remix of the song rather than the original version.
There was one problem though. The remix was a faster tempo so all of the footage that we already had wouldn’t line up.
Using my newfound mindset I decided that I could figure out how to make it work and in the end I just did the math to figure out that the new version of the song was 12.5% faster than the original so I just sped up the clips by 12.5% and it ended up looking really cool and interesting.
It wasn’t enough of a change to make the performance look sped up and weird but just enough to make it look a little more unique.
Throughout the process we often had to pivot and make hard decisions and honestly there were times when I thought it would never end and I just wanted to give up.
For months I spent the first three hours of every day working on the renders and editing of the video.
Let me remind you, I didn’t even know how to do a lot of this.. I just had to figure it out and learn as I went. I would see something in my head and then just toil and tinker until it was on my computer screen.
Little by little it came together until I eventually came to the home stretch which was a render of a cool warp drive 3D model that I projected the existing cut of music video onto and then edited back on top of the video for transitions and a little extra sauce and flair.
Now, after months and months of production blood, sweat, and tears the video is finished and we actually have a ton of footage that never made it into the final cut so we’ve been repurposing it for social media content which worked out perfectly. You can find it all on our instagram page.
I also have to mention a strange feeling that was present thought most of this process. It’s hard to describe but it’s almost a feeling of loss or finality. If you’ve been paying attention at all, you will have seen the rapid rise of A.I. and A.I. based tools. Some of the new video tools that are becoming available are unbelievable and I just can’t help but feel like this will be the last music video I ever make… at least in a traditional sense.
Generative A.I. will simply become too good and too efficient. It will undoubtedly make producing a video this way in the future just not make any sense for me. It would be like an extreme version of writing a book by hand with an old school feather pen and ink.
So, having that in mind throughout the process just felt kind of heavy… a like a last dance or something. There’s a lot of more to say here and I’m sure I’ll dive into it in the future.
In closing I have to acknowledge and thank a couple people. First, my brothers for climbing on board, being patient, and trusting me with the vision. We all had to invest our own money and countless hours into this project and they ripped it and send it hard.
Next, my roommates Tami (Carmen), Darrel (Eric), and Tilly.. They had to put up with a huge mess and an out-of-commission garage a lot of nights and never complained. Tami also helped us shoot some of the scenes and photos when we all had to be in the shot at once.
Lastly, my parents, who are always super supportive and encouraging. They even invested some of their own money into the video to help make it happen. That not only paid for some of our expenses but also provided an additional reinforcement and motivation to see it through to the end and make it the best it could be.
If you’ve consumed any of our music or art up to this point.. thank YOU. I hope you’re inspired.
If I could leave you with one thing from here.. it’s the idea that you are more capable than you may think. Take some time to open up, quiet your mind, and just listen and pay attention. You might find that what pops in there can change your life and lead in directions you never imagined.
As always, I’m happy to receive feedback, advice or to just have a conversation about any of the topics on this blog! Don’t hesitate to comment or reach out via social media
(@danny_suede on all platforms)