We have a special love for Focus Creeps, the directorial duo of Aaron Brown and Ben Chappell, who’ve been responsible for videos like Girls‘ “Lust for Life” and “Hellhole Rat Race,” Cass McCombs‘ “Executioner’s Song,” Neon Indian’s “Sleep Paralysist” and plenty more. With each new video they direct, they’ll be giving FADER a special behind the scenes rundown of each of their projects, the who, what, where, when and why of each video. We’ve got their answers and an on set photo after the jump and the final product of Wavves’ “King of the Beach” video above.
What video are you making?
Wavves "King of The Beach."
Why are you making it?
They asked us, we met up, there were no real preconceived ideas before we met, and we pretty much started making up these activities that took the video into this fictional direction. They have tons of pre-branded stuff so we went further in that direction, into a little violence, a little crime & nonsense.
Where are you?
We're in LA. The band had a long tour coming up so we had just a little time to shoot. We came up with characters and we were going to write up a little myth to release with the video, but I got pulled away on some other shoots & Nathan & Stephen were on tour so we didn't get anything on paper. It was rad getting to know them (especially when they pushed me down and kicked sand in my face) and it was really natural to transform their attitude into these fictional characters. We would start with pretty basic ideas, then get further out with props and so on, and Natasha, who made all the props and costumes happen, started sewing, bedazzling, photocopying and so on to create this weird augmented Wavves world.
What is the story?
Basically we were all really into putting together some characters based on the minimal lyrics: the characters are royalty, they're mafia, they're black market, they're underground, they're punk, they're trap, they're street urchins, they're a combination of all these subcultures. Like they make they're own $, have their own currency, wear, smoke & eat gold, burn the flag and wave their own all while normal people go about their everyday boring business.
What weird shit happened?
They were really sick, I got really sick, so we were all in this kinda daze while we went swimming, and so on—I kept getting lost on the freeways like a retard while we were location scouting. Every sketchy thing we did in the video was just what it looks like, all in broad daylight, out in public, nothing's tricked in the video, it's just them doing their thing around LA.
Was it fun?
Super fun. The band had all kinds of ideas, we probably did half of what we came up with which is a bummer, we were all ready to jump off cliffs into the ocean, play tennis, go to six flags, to the club, the list goes on…
