The latest Adam Neustadter-directed music video for rock band Morningwood gives a tasty launch to SUGARBABY, the lead single off the band's new four-track digital EP released this month.
Neustadter tapped New York-based visual FX studio Guava (www.guavanyc.com) and their vfx artist Mark Wilhelm to handle effects and compositing on the song's comedic video, which depicts a puppet protagonist living the fast life.
Guava worked with Neustadter on the last Morningwood video for NTH DEGREE. "We seem to work creatively well together," Wilhelm says of his collaboration with Neustadter. "He brings the videos to me while they're still in the conceptual phase, allowing for a lot of creative input. It's great when an artist has the ability to start off with a blank canvas and has the trust of the director to bring his vision to life."
SUGARBABY tells the story of a party girl struggling to keep up in the chaos of the downtown nightlife scene. In the video, the lead role is played by a puppet, created in the likeness of Morningwood singer Chantal Claret by James W. Wojtal Jr., a veteran of the Jim Henson Studio and the Broadway play AVENUE Q. The Chantal puppet interacts with the real-life people of the city, and in the end, transforms into the flesh-and-blood singer, as she takes off for a new life with a wealthy uptown man.
"If it were an actress or Chantal playing this role, it could have been a pretty dark and sad story, but the puppet makes any scenario hilarious, no matter how dark and inappropriate it is," Neustadter said. "Placing the puppet in this very specific downtown scene could be thought of as a metaphor if the viewer wants to read into it, but if they don't it's still a really funny video."
Drawing viewers into segments of the puppet party-girl's misadventures are swirling transitions created by Wilhelm. "The most important effect needed for the video was having the Chantal puppet fall through three retro-style vortex scenes. I designed the vortexes to be a combination of retro graphics and background footage," he said.
The background footage is meant to express Chantal's thoughts, creating a dreamlike feel," Wilhelm described. "With input from Adam, the band, and myself, several treatments were done before finally signing off on our finished style and look."
Flame artists Jason Farber and Kristin Koch took care of rig removal, flicker removal, all-around clean-up and conforming of the video in Guava's Discreet Flame suites, while color correction was done at Guava's sister company, Nice Shoes, by colorist Ronald Sudul on their new Baselight 8 system, with a more stylized color correct finished in Flame.
The SUGARBABY video premiered in August on MTV's FNMTV PREMIERES -- an unexpected but welcome development. "Since almost all music videos are viewed exclusively online, we wanted to push this as far as we could and do things that we couldn't get away with on TV," Neustadter said. "The fact that it had a big MTV premiere is amazing."
To see the video, go to http://www.guavanyc.com/morningwood/.
