Champagne Fever — “Cheerios”

“We jerry-rigged all the electronics in the house to go poltergeist. We invited DJ Prada, bought a trunk full of Cheerios, and just partied all night.”

ON THE PRODUCTION OF “CHEERIOS”

After a year of squatting in an empty house in the suburbs of Maryland, Grey Goon was finally getting kicked out.

Z: Doug [Grey Goon] called me and was like, ‘Yo. We only got 18 more hours in squatter house. Let’s shoot this video.’

All the performance takes were filmed in the squatter house using two Epic-X’s mounted on a hacked 3D beamsplitter rig, and then composited in post. We bounced between the joined footage and the individual cameras in the edit. The lighting we used for these setups were entirely Champagne Fever’s own.

GG: We had basically moved out already. All that was left was a bunch of lamps, music gear, a TV, our instruments, and this MIDI controlled lighting rig that we have been programming for our live show. We plugged the midi light controller into all the house lamps and made a quick pulsing light show that played in sync to the nuances of the track.

“I wanted to turn the whole room into a TV set, and then put Champagne Fever inside of it.”

Z: As the light was pulsing to the music, we rigged a 70" TV for live video feedback behind them on the “karaoke-style” setups. I wanted to turn the whole room into a TV, and then put Champagne Fever inside of it. To do that we set up an old Hi-8 video camera and projector for the feedback effects during the performance scenes.

T$: It was all so spur-of-the-moment and no-fucks-given. We jerry-rigged all the electronics in the house to go poltergeist. We invited DJ Prada, bought a trunk full of Cheerios, and just partied all night.

Z: Cheerios is a song about teetering on the edge of bad decisions, and I wanted to make sure our hero had his “dramatic rooftop moment.” The only storyboarded sequence is when you see a piece of cereal drop from DJ Prada’s mouth, bounce off T$’s coke-nail, and free-fall down through the cereal dusted sky. This intercuts with Grey Goon’s tongue-in-cheek “he’s gonna jump” moment on top of his Hyundai.

“Cheerios”

director | zambia
cinematography | cripps pink and dj prada
light programming | champagne fever and zambii
midi equipment | Saggitronics

special thanks
kiyophoto | dj prada | charlie slick

cheerios was filmed in the following formats:
16mm | Bolex H16 | Angenieux super-speed Zoom
5K RAW | Red Epic-X | Zeiss Superspeeds

16mm film services | Colorlab, Rockville

Edited with Final Cut Pro 7