Shot in one day in and around Los Angeles’ Echo Park / Silver Lake area with a modest crew, Matt Devine takes the good word of French DJ and producer Born Dirty to the LA streets in positive vibes music video Get Up Get Out. Below, Matt shares how a last minute production crisis led to a tequila fuelled, eleventh hour rewrite which ultimately solidified the video’s community spirit.
The video came about after Born Dirty sent me the track and wanted a video that really worked with its positive message. I usually end up writing a narrative into my video concepts so this was a hard track to do that with. But I came up with this idea because I imagined it was what the woman in the sample (Amber or @jstlbby) might do if she had the means to project her message in a more analog way rather than just on Instagram.
The initial idea was to actually have Amber in the car yelling the message over a big sound system on the roof of her Mercedes or whatever she drove. However, typical to the world of music videos, for personal reasons Amber became unavailable 3 days before the shoot. We had a whole crew of about 10 people plus a bunch of dancers booked and now no lead role and no car. So I went and drank a lot of Tequila that night and rewrote the idea.
Mika (Born Dirty) loved the idea of a sweet but badass old lady driving the car instead. Like she was spreading a positive message to the younger people in her neighbourhood. I liked the narrative of it because she is someone who has lived a while and knows things. This could also be something she does every other day so we wanted to make it feel like they all knew her. So when she drives past they wave or dance to her music and she basically just cheers people up.
I went and drank a lot of Tequila that night and rewrote the idea.
We also liked the simplicity of this narrative and wanted to execute it in a way that still had some style and wasn’t cheesy or over the top. We wanted to achieve a cinematic look that still had some honesty to it so we didn’t go all out strapping the cameras down to make them stable. That way we could keep a bit of shake in there to give it some life so that it felt raw and a good mix of documentary and cinematic. We feel like we struck a good balance with it and are very happy with the video.
Next up, as well as a few commercials I’m actually working on another video with Born Dirty that has been on the boil for a good 6 months. It’s a bit more on the dark side tonally but will be just as much fun as the other films we usually make together. It’s a Sci-Fi / Rap video for a track he hasn’t even made yet. We are trying a new idea where I’m going to make a video and then he’s going to make a track that suits it. Kind of reversing the process.
I’m also working on a feature film that shoots next year that’s based on a sweet short film I made 5 years ago that had some viral success on Youtube called Panyee FC.
