about the video:
There’s some really brutal writing throughout Songs of Pain and Leisure, particularly regarding relationships – our relationship to others, to the objects we surround ourselves with, and to American culture at large. I was hoping to depict that connection and disconnection, visually, with “Pawn Shop Guns.” The kernel of the idea was a person’s head singing the song, in real-time, with the body doing everyday things (e.g. drinking with friends, playing with a gun, doing chores, etc.) in time-lapse. The result would hopefully be a kind of optical disconnect. We did some test shooting and while we were happy with the way the footage looked, the feasibility of doing multiple, 3-5 hour, non-stop shots presented a big challenge. So we searched for other ways to detach the body, to give the whole video a time-lapse feel without the restrictions of shooting in time-lapse. What we settled on is a technique called frame blending, which removes certain frames and then “fills in the blanks” while allowing us to shoot in real-time. The end result – which utilizes remapped footage, frame blending, and over crank variations with some color grading, light leaks, and film burns – evolved quite a bit but still expresses, hopefully, the core of that original idea.
