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By Karen Bliss - JAM! Music, Canoe.ca
It's amazing what Calgary-born comic book king and first-time non-animated video director Todd McFarlane can do with a butterfly, candles, a black cloak, white dress, dark dank streets, a cage, and, of course, a great song.
"Breath," recorded by Swollen Members with Nelly Furtado, is latest single from the hip-hop group's gold-selling latest album, "Monsters In The Closet."
The video, which debuted on MuchMusic yesterday, and will screen on MTV Canada today before getting placed into immediate rotation on both channels, was shot in just fourteen-and-a-half hours in Vancouver, in mid-December, on a budget of about $130,000 (Cdn).
McFarlane, the imaginative and boundary-pushing animator, best known for his modern re-design of the classic Spider-Man and subsequent creation of animated action hero Spawn and action figure series, says the limited budget, in the end, gave him more freedom.
"Some of the big videos, when they spend a lot of money, you can have someone honking at every move, making sure you're spending it right," he explains. "If you don't have much time or money, everybody's expectations are a little bit lower and they just go, 'Do whatever you want.'"
McFarlane, who was initially contacted by Swollen Members' management company Nettwerk about designing action figures in the likeness of the four-man hip-hop group and returned with an offer to direct their video instead, used that freedom to explore some of the dark themes some of his other pursuits don't allow.
"The first pass I gave them I think they were a little disappointed. I think it was a little lighter than they wanted," McFarlane admits. "I was shy on that side. When they said, they were hoping to be a little darker and moodier, I said 'Cool, right on. We can do that one. That's what I'd rather be doing.'"
"I know that sometimes when you've got certain executive decisions that need to be made and the people spending money don't necessarily see it in the same vein as you do. But in this case, given that (Swollen Members MC) Mad Child runs the label (Battle Axe) himself, there wasn't a bunch of people making decisions on an executive level, other than him, so it actually worked out."
McFarlane has helped create award-winning animated videos for Pearl Jam and Korn, for "Do the Evolution" and "Freak on a Leash," respectively, which takes between five to seven weeks to design and finish, he says. For the Swollen Members video, the material with which he has to work has to be captured at the shoot and he quickly discovered that he had to toss a few of his original ideas when he surveyed the limitations of the site in Vancouver.
"I got a little ambitious for the time and the money, so we just had to wing it," says McFarlane. "I'll lie and say it was all intentional (laughs). We shot the interior (scenes) inside a warehouse and the exterior in a backlot that was billed for the TV show 'Dark Angel,' so it had more interesting things than just going out into a real street. We were able to get a little bit more clever with it.
"We found a cage in the corner (of the set), and if you look at any of the write ups that I did, the word 'cage' isn't in any of them. We ended up using that as a main prop for the whole day and reconfigured the story line around this cage element. "There were revisions all the way up until they said, 'ENNNNDDD!. Done! Wrap!'"
Scaled back from the original treatment were plans for Swollen Members to jump fences, scale catwalks, bust though boarded up windows, and wander down endless corridors and stairwells. A car scene was scrapped altogether, as was the idea of Furtado in white shiny leather (no doubt, that had more to do with taste than money). Instead, a butterfly appears, candles light and producer/DJ Rob The Viking is seen trapped in a cage. A female profile (Nelly Furtado), cloaked in black, tosses her cover to reveal an angelic figure in a sheer white dress.
Meanwhile, emcees Mad Child, Prevail and Moka Only convene in the dark backstreets, on the hunt for Rob, no doubt. The three are lured by the butterfly down corridors to Rob, where the vampiric Furtado bites her prey and captures them in the cage. Now she can breath.
"She's the angel, the goddess of light and a little bit of a damsel in distress, although there's a twist ending on it," says McFarlane. "I don't want to make all the characters too easy to get a handle on."
Even though the "Breath" video doesn't feature McFarlane's trademark animation, he believes that fans of his comic book creations and action figures will see a style that is distinctly him. "Just in terms of mood and there's sort of a big symbolic theme going on, hidden monsters, if you will."
No doubt any number of musicians would have wanted to work with McFarlane on his first non-animated music video, so why would he choose to work with Swollen Members, a group that only has a following outside Canada among underground hip-hop heads?
"Couple of reasons," McFarlane says. "One is they're Canadian; I'm Canadian. You have to do a little bit of nepotism in there and it wasn't going to be completely obscure having Nelly in there. It wasn't going to be a hidden video. They've made their mark up in Canada and have won a few awards.
"They are actually at that point where it's actually pretty crucial for them. They gotta take the next step. They've conquered Canada, now what?"
Action figures perhaps?
"Everybody is worthy of an action figure if they create enough fans for themselves," he says.
January 15, 2003 [Canoe.ca]