Nick Chatfield-Taylor

Nick Chatfield-Taylor likes to take photos of people in the middle of the night.  He also makes T-shirts.  And he once stabbed his sister in the face.

Oh, and he shot the Matt and Kim video for "Yea, Yeah."  Both vidoes.  The one you've probably seen, and this one.



Chief Magazine: Where did you grow up? Where ya from?

Nick Chatfield-Taylor: I grew up in Massachusetts in a small town call Weston, where even the special education kids thought that I was gay. They still write about it in their blogs to this day. My mom searches for my name on Google all the time and she sends me stuff she finds. She sent me this one blog by of one of those kids that rode the short bus, writing about how he was getting married and how he was thinking about hyphenating his name "like that Nick Chatfield-Taylor kid who was probably gay."

No... That's amazing.

Yeah. So, I really didn't fit into my town.

So, what kind of stuff were you into when you were a kid? What kind of kid were you?

Riding bikes, going to the center of town and hanging out, pretending to skateboard.

So pretty standard fare.

Yeah. I did tech for the theater company and that eventually that just turned into pretty much partying all the time for the high school standards in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, but Weston is a small town known for being rich.

Nice, nice. What state did you say that was in?

Massachusetts. It's like 15 minutes outside of Boston.

Cool. So, what have you been up to recently? What do you have going on now?

Besides trying to finish school, I'm working on a few poster designs for people that saw the poster design for BIKE and liked it and asked me to do something for them. Colin and I--Colin did the Matt and Kim video for "5K" and I did "Yea Yeah"--are collaborating on a music video for a different band's entire album, which is hush hush right now, so I can't tell you much about it. But it's gonna be… it's gonna be big.

Sounds good.

There's gonna be animation, live-action stuff. It's gonna be awesome. At the heart of it, it's a music video. What we pitched to the band was to do a music video for the whole album.

Wow, that's cool. How long is the album? Is it like 60 minutes or is it more like a half hour deal?

It's a full album. But i think its still a little less than 30 minutes. Which is still a big project.

It's a huge project .

Yeah. I mean, the first talk we had with them, they suggested that we just pick out a group of songs in the album, so it might not be the whole album but it's still gonna be big. We're gonna dedicate the next couple months of our lives to it.

That's fantastic.

And besides that, the photo project I'm working on right now is photographing people at four o'clock in the morning after they've been asleep for four hours or just once they're into a deep sleep.

What I do is, I take their bed sheets and their pillowcases and I hang those up in a collage on a wall and set up all the lights, the camera, everything and then at four o'clock in the morning, wake them up, have them stumble over to the set up, take one photo of them and let them go back to bed.

That's cool. How many of them do you have so far?

I only have two just cause it's impossible to get on a schedule which you can work in the day, do a lot of work at four o'clock in the morning and then be able to get started again for work the next day.

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It sounds like every shoot is like a three day schedule fuck up.

Yeah, every shoot has consequences for more than three days.

Are you happy with the end result of all that work?

At first, the first couple of photos didn't come out how I wanted them to, but I changed how I was taking the photos and now they come out the way I like them.

What was the difference?

The first photo I took was just a white backdrop, kind of Richard Avedon's style. It was just too flat. I mean, the kid looked terrible, which was what I was going for, but it was just too flat that all you had was the kid looking terrible. So then I tried with the backdrop, having the kids sit on their couch, um, and those just looked like they were stoned, so it was just kind of like, "Okay, just a bunch of stoned kids sitting on a couch." And then this third one with the bed sheets worked the best 'cause it gives it…

Well, you get a little piece of their personality.

Yeah, exactly.

Each shot, even the background and the environment is a part of the subject.

Yeah, like one kid, you have sheets that match, like the sheet matches the pillowcase. For another kid, you have stains on a pillowcase that looks like it's out of the dumpster.

Nice.

And then, other kids you have something with a nice graphic on the sheet but the pillowcase, like, has teeth on it or something. So yeah, the sheets do give a hint of personality juxtaposed with these people looking their worst.

Yeah, at 4 a.m., nobody's looking pretty.

Yeah, everyone's bloated and out of it.

Well, you're shocking them out of R.E.M. sleep… How do you wake them up? Do you just scream at them?

I cover all their windows in their house, their apartments, as much as possible so there's no light. I want them to be as asleep as possible. So, when the time is right, I just go into their rooms and whisper at them until they wake up. So, I don't flash the lights. I don't set an alarm. I just kind of say [whispers] "Hey, can we do that photo now?" until they're like, "Oh, yeah. Okay, okay, we'll go do it," and then I go out and get myself up behind the camera.

What do you shoot them with?

It's a 4x5 camera, and I just ready the shutter and as soon as they're there, as they stumble over in complete darkness, so they're still asleep, and then hit the button and a big strobe light goes off. I only do one photo because they wake up after one photo.

That's sounds great.

Thanks. Recently, I've sort of been debating whether or not to show them on the wall or show them on the floor 'cause, while I do take them standing up, there's something about when they're lying down, these people just look like they're kind of floating off of the bed sheets. So I'm playing around with how to show them.

That sounds great. It would be really cool to see them on the ground.

Yeah, I mean, I love the idea of someone walking into a gallery and there's nothing on the wall.

Okay, but as far as the photography, what kind of stuff do you like shooting?

All the portraits that I take, I like. I always end up with good results or something that I wanted. But I hate taking portraits because I hate being one on one with people. So, taking portraits for me is a battle just 'cause I hate the moments of, "Alrighty, so we're gonna do this," and it's just you and one other person in a room and there's not much you have to talk about all the time.

You have to entertain them while you do it.

You can, I mean, if you drop something and they realize it, what's the consequences. You're putting them on trial. You're putting them in front of the camera and you're surveilling them but, at the same time, they got nobody else to watch but you, so while you're running around doing stuff, they're just surveilling you the whole time.

You're kinda under the microscope.

Yeah, but besides portraits...

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Are you one of those guys who carries a camera wherever you go?

No, I hate carrying a camera, I don't have anything against people who take a camera around everywhere they go. No, I take that back. Certain people that carry a camera everywhere I despise because I feel like they ruin moments but, other people its just kind of, like, it's part of them and they're not in the way.

But for a long time, I mean, a lot of it was going to concerts and taking photos, doing concert photography and I eventually was like, "Wait a second, I have all these moments on films like, look at this cool moment. Look at this, this is awesome. That's awesome. I'm not in any of these." A lot of the photographs that I like, I'm not in, just 'cause I'm like, "Oh man, this is a good photograph but look at what I'm doing," and I realized and I'd try and do it less and less.

I try to not respond to when people are taking photos. It's a hard thing to do but I'm pretty good at just seeing it and ignoring it now but, I used to just, when I see that someone was taking out a camera, I'd make the photo. Like do things that would make that photo good for them. And so after going to concerts for a long time and taking lots of photos, I was just like, "Fuck it, I'm not bringing my camera anywhere anymore. I will bring it on trips or on special occasion but I'm just leaving my camera at home and going out and experiencing things. I just don't want to be experiencing things through a 35mm lens."

It's a weird thing. It's kind of a weird evolution of thought when you're behind the camera so much where you're kind of think like, "I'm really… I'm succeeding here in kind of encapsulating and capturing a moment that like I'm really enjoying myself, but i'm outside of the evidence." and I don't, to be honest, I don't care if I'm in the picture or not. That's not really what it is.

I don't care whether or not I'm in the photo.

I think that it's all just about having a good time. All of this other shit is just bonus compared to that. I feel bad for people that aren't enjoying themselves because they either have a camera stuck to their face or are trying to shove their face in front of one. When you try to stick your head in every picture you just come off looking retarded.

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I totally agree with you completely. It's good not to look like a retard.

I would shoot at shows because if i didn't feel like jumping around, I knew I could at least shoot it well and I knew that I was having a good time doing that. Also, the bands seemed to appreciate it when you would give them the photos burnt to DVDs and all that. It was like, "Cool. This fun thing doesn't cost me anything to do, I mean God love digital for that alone, and people seem to appreciate it, so why the hell not?" Admittedly, at a point It became like work, so I kind of backed away from it, but that stuff always comes in phases.

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Well, the other reason I started despising it was just because I, in general, I started despising digital just because, I mean, you can go somewhere and you can take 1,200 photos in the span of 100 minutes and then you can go home and sort through it all and I just started looking at my photography and I was like, "I'm not doing anything anymore. All I'm doing is going and, like, hitting this button over and over again until I get something that I like," and I was kind of, like, unteaching myself photography.

Right. That's an interesting way to think about it.

I just kind of tried limiting myself to the number of photos I can take at an event and I mean, every once in a while I'd just go "click, click, click, click," just 'cause maybe there's a strobe light and you're trying to go with the light, but I try framing everything more and more, which is what photography is about.

Yep. I think you're right as far as that goes, like what was cool especially with Lonesome Doves and other local Brooklyn bands, after the show we'd just scroll through the 800 photos I took and it would be little movies of the entire thing, but it's not a goddamn photo. That's good for about one percent of the time. After that, you kind of just want to have a really sweet photo. What's your favorite camera you're shooting with now?

I bounce back and forth between two 4x5 cameras just because you get negatives that are four inches by five inches and, yeah, you get detail that you just can't get with a smaller camera. You can't get it with a readily available digital camera. I mean, you just get one shot and it takes you at least five minutes just to set up that shot but you get as much detail as you're ever going to need. So I use that, which I'm using on the sleep portraits and a Hasselblad square format just 'cause it's another larger format but it's easier to take around.

Right. Cool. How long have you been doing photography?

I started doing photography in high school. I'd always take my dad's camera whenever he brought it anywhere and wanted to take photos but I always just considered it "taking my dad's camera and taking photos." And then in high school, I started taking photo classes all the time. I started working at my buddy Moses'…his dad had a gallery and so, Moses and I would hang out all the time and take photographs. We ended up both interning at his dad's gallery together and the school I went to…I just been a Math kid since I was born. I could do Math in my head easily. I've been in all advanced Math classes as long as I could live, apparently. I knew I was good at Math but I couldn't just see where that was going. Like, "Okay, what do I do? I'm pent up in a cubicle doing equations?" That's literally how I thought my life was going to be like in high school. I was, like, I graduate high school and I go to a Math college and I learn how to do Math really well and I go somewhere and I do Math.

In a basement, somewhere.

Yeah, and I was like, "That's not cool." And so, when I kind of got more into photography, I was just like, "I could go out and take photos and then spend hours in a darkroom and hang out with my friend's and do more, like, listening to good music, developing photos and hanging out together all the time?" I was like, "This is for me." So, I got into it in high school and then, how I ended up going to art school was watching a Jean Michel Jarre concert on PBS with my mom one night. Do you know who he is?

Uh-huh.

He's a musician from the 80s who does really big concerts, like light shows and fireworks, laser shows. It's got a keytarist. He's thrown the biggest concert ever in the biennial of Moscow. They had him play and, I think, there were a million people there. It was an extra ordinary amount of people and my mom and I were watching this concert and I was like, "This is cool. The guy's doing whatever he wants to do. He wants a laser, he gets a laser." And it was just, he has giant projectors. It was just something I hadn't seen before and my mom was, "So, wait, you're digging this?" I don't think she used that word, but my mom picked up on how I was responding to this and put me on the path to art school and it was just, she started really supporting me being creative just because I had been a Math kid for so long and she's a fashion designer and she actually went to Pratt for two years and then went to RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] but I had never been a creative kid. I just kind of always been like, "Alrighty, go to Math class, go to this class, go home, watch TV."

So she just king of started really supporting it and helping me along with it and then she…I applied to all these schools that I don't know why I applied to. I think they were just in some book that said "these schools have photo things and video things" and I ended up just at the last minute applying to Pratt and went and showed my portfolio to them in New York, at Pratt two days after my first girlfriend broke up with me. So I've come to the city…my first girlfriend breaks up with me two days before I get on a train ride with my younger sister to New York, in which I'm like hiding away from her and crying under my beanie hat.

I get to New York, go to the interview at Pratt. They tell me I didn't bring enough material and that I'm going to have to come back and I was like, "I hate everything. I don't want to do anything." But then, I ended up calling the Massachusetts representative who said he saw my transcript getting handed around, and he pretty much just accepted me on the spot over the phone. Yeah, he said to me, "I've seen you transcript around. Let me call you in a week. I'll let you know if you got in or not." So I called him back in a week and he was like, "I don't know yet... well, you know what, fine. You're in." and I was cool. I didn't even wait to here from the other school. I was like, "My mom went to Pratt. Good enough for me." So that was it.

That's a good endorsement.

Yeah and the other stuff, I got into video in high school a lot, too, because my school had a really advanced video program because this woman that they brought in and she jump started it. Besides going to the darkroom all the time, my friends and I would watch and make videos all the time. So, it's how I got into video.

So, how did you get hooked up with BIKE?

Well, Colin and I were looking for advanced editing classes at school and in the first class, this guy was looking over our shoulder the whole time, copying everything that we're doing and I'm starting to get pissed off 'cause, even though we're just making squares bouncing on a screen, he was copying us and we didn't like that. Then I see him at Pratt's Brooklyn campus and he comes up to me and tells me how everything I was doing was awesome and he wants me to look at his movie and tell him what I think about it.

So Colin and I go over and we look at it and it's this movie about Mardi Gras beads and he has interviews with the people that make them in the factories and he has a lot of really good material but he just edited it together so it just looked like something seen in school. Completely educational and dry and we were really honest with him saying things along the lines of, "Dude, you can't do it like this. This sucks. Like, you have so much great footage that you have to explore. You have all these interviews with these sweat shop factory girls that you don't even put in it. That's what people want to see. They know that China did this and American did this, but people want to get into the characters. You really need to explore Mardi Gras beads through the characters around them." And so, he kind of started reworking his film, which then eventually got into Sundance.

Was it shot in China?

He went to China back and forth. The first time, he emailed the owner of the factory and gave him a little heads up that he was going but then he kind of just showed up at the factory doors and, like, walked in and pretty much said, "Hey, I'm going to interview you." They assumed, "Oh, he's from America. He has a camera. He's probably really nice," and the owner just want to show everything off. So the owner just gave him full access, not knowing what he was getting into, and then hooked him up with a guy in America, this guy Don, who says the stupidest things on camera that I ever heard. He's talking about sweatshops and he's like, "Oh yeah, it looks like a concentration camp over there but the girls don't want to leave."

Wow, thats insane.

Yeah.

Sorry, tell me more about Sundance.

No problem, So I went out there and on one night got into…

He brought you out?

Yes, we all went out, just pretty much everybody who worked on the film went out, like eight of us that worked on the film. And the way the box office works out there, if you want to get a ticket to a film, there's two ways to get tickets. You can go and wait two hours before the movie starts, in a long line, and you just wait there and you get a number and eventually you might get a ticket if you're lucky or the night before, you go to the box office, where they release the tickets for each movie, but you pretty much have to be one of the first 30 people in line.

So I went at two in the morning and stayed up the whole night and the whole time, I'm wearing like ten pounds of Mardi Gras beads because that was what our promotion was, we wore Mardi Gras beads and people would come up to you and were like, "Oh, Mardi Gras beads. I love that." to which we would reply, "Oh, here, come see the movie."

So now, at 8 a.m., it's an hour before the box office is opening and I'm just dead. I don't care enough to talk to anybody. I just want to get tickets, go home, go to sleep, then go see some movies. Suddenly, this guy comes up to me and he was like, "Hey, um, do you know Dorian Lightfound from Telluride Clothing?" and I was thinking, Wow. This is weird. This guy knows someone with the same name as my mom. That's messed up. finally saying out loud, "Wait, yeah. That's my mom," so he says, "Oh, so you're Nick," and I replied, "How…this is weird," 'cause I haven't slept in at least a day and he's telling me he knows my mom and I'm just standing there thinking, "Okay, this is weird." But he pitched my mom's company to do their webpage a week before and at the end of talking to them, he explains that he's going to Sundance and my mom did the proper motherly thing to do, exclaiming her son was going to Sundance and she said it was about a Mardi Gras movie. So, he saw the Mardi Gras beads, which he was looking for, to eventually find me, but happened to find me right off the bat, and so we talked some more and then we talked about Brooklyn and said he was doing a movie about Black Label kids and at the time, I was living with one of them. And I just blurted out, "Oh, I'm living with one of those guys."

Who were you living with?

James Stache.

Oh, cool. One of the nicest guys in Brooklyn.

So there was just kind of this cosmic "we were suppose to meet somehow." At the time, it just kind of felt like we were both on drugs, 'cause I haven't slept in a long time and I'm meeting some guy that knew my life story of the past month and a half and so he pretty much told me to call him up when I get back to New York. I wrote him an email when I got back and was like, "Yeah, you told me to come to your office. Can you give me a job too?" And I went and met up and he was like, "Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm suppose to give you a job. I don't know why, but I'm suppose to give you a job." So, I just started working with them. They were working on a commercial and then the other project was BIKE so I just started helping out with BIKE. That's how BIKE happened.

How did the Mardi Gras beads flick do?

Well, it's called Mardi Gras: Made in China. It's being distributed on DVD. I mean, it did go, I think it got a small run theatrical release.

Really?

So, yeah. It went bigger than anyone involved in it thought, so it's kind of like, "Yeah, we're making a movie, right, we're at Sundance talking to people. This is weird." so, BIKE, I just began putting in 70 hour weeks in the company 'cause, like, I had taken the semester off from school.

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What's the name of the company?

Fountain Head.

So, I just kind of started putting in 70 hour work weeks, waking up on the couch to someone needing that room to do a meeting and I was like, "Oh, shit, okay. I gotta get back to work."

I just fully engrossed in my life in it because my dad had passed away early the semester before, so it was just kind of something I could hold onto and distract myself with and it was work and I love working.

It was just kind of an excuse to not think about my dad and just do work all the time and so, because I was putting in so much work, the directors kept on giving me slightly bigger and bigger projects and then I just kind of found things that ended up, they ended up putting in the movie.

So, how did that end up? Didn't BIKE go to Sundance?

BIKE went to Slamdance. Slamdance runs at the same time as Sundance, in the same city, on the same hill, but it's a lot smaller.

Can you tell me the Doyle story? Didn't Black Label come up to Slamdance?

Yeah, Doyle… well, Doyle, he was in California, like, hopped on a plane over, and the kids from Reno, Nevada came over and they rode down with tall bikes. Are you looking for the one story everybody kind of hears about?

Yeah.

Okay. The Reno, Nevada kids, Doyle and Tony all shared one condo, so there were like 15 kids all in one room, which, I don't know, I've done that before and everybody pretty much manages to get along. You find somewhere to sleep on the floor, a couple of people get the bed. People are jealous, but whatever. So Doyle and his girlfriend stake claim on the bed. Nobody really gave a shit. They want the bed, they can have it, no big deal. Then, one night, the Reno kids, Tony and I, just everybody's but them are in the condo just getting drunk, having a good time. Then Doyle comes back with a couple of people, friends of his that happen to be in town, and as the night is winding down, Doyle decides to go to bed. The thing is, Tony's already in the bed and has decided, he's not leaving.

Eventually, the good humor of Doyle runs out and Tony is still being a baby and not getting out of the bed so Doyle kind of throws him off of the bed. Then Tony takes down Doyle by tackling him and it kind of turns into "oh-look-at-them-boys-will-be-boys" wrestling. But suddenly, Tony slams Doyle's head into a cabinet and Doyle responds and, at that point, Doyle, and you know Doyle, he's not exactly a little guy, is on top of Tony with his entire weight, on top of him saying, "Tony, give it up. No need to fight about it. Just get over it." Totally rational, just breaking the news to Tony that it was over, that he had lost.

So to respond, Tony grabs Doyle's balls and squeezes them to which Doyle, not knowing anything other than that he's getting his balls squeezed, he needs to get this kid off of his balls, reaches for a coffee pot. The coffee pot  had been sitting there for three days, nobody had touched it that night, no one was using it, and just smashes it over Tony's head, only to find out that it was full of boiling water.

I talked to him the next day and he was quite concerned and he said, "I didn't know that had boiling hot water in it. It has been sitting there. I just wanted to calm the kid down and throw some water on him, shock him out of whatever mood that he was in." But at the point, yeah Tony, Tony started ranting and raving and someone eventually took him to the hospital. So, that's that.

That's that.

That whole time, the quieter of the two girls that comes in and I are sitting next to each other on the couch. I'm a little spaced out. She's a little shy. We're not really talking to each other. Eventually, one of us asks the other their name and we start talking. I ask her what she's at Sundance for and she said she was working on this movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

I knew the movie was there but I hadn't paid much attention to it, but three years, four years earlier while I was in Los Angeles, I had filmed a funeral for the EV1 – the Electric Car. Someone I knew just said, "Oh, you're a camera guy. Do you want to go film this?" So I was a camera guy on the EV1 – the Electric Car funeral but I hadn't paid attention to it since then, but I'm sitting next to this girl who says she worked on "Who Killed the Electric Car?" I'm like, "Oh, I think I have footage in that movie. Maybe." And she was like, "Oh, what's your name?" and I said "Nick Chatfield-Taylor." And she skyrockets off the couch and was just like, "No. You're Nick Chatfield-Taylor?" and just starts repeating my name over and over again and is, like, flipping out. When she calms down a little she tells me they've been looking for me for six months because they can't digitize my footage. They don't know what frame rate I shot it at or something. So she's calling her director, calling her producer, being like, "I found Nick Chatfield-Taylor. I found Nick Chatfield-Taylor." And I'm just sitting there, like, wow, the girl knows my name. This is weird.

Nice way to break the ice too.

Yeah and so, eventually we all go our separate ways for the night and she calls me the next day. She has been looking for me for the past six months but it's not because my footage isn't in the movie. It's because my footage is in the movie and she needs me to sign papers for it. I was like, "Eh, it's still cool." So she invites me to the opening and we end up going to the movie opening party afterwards, having a lot of fun.

Oh, that's nice.

Every year at Sundance that I've gone, it has been a cosmic experience, meeting people and thinking "Wow."

It seems like you've been getting involved with relatively interesting projects back to back, with minimal hustling.

Yeah.

And you just kind of let that shit happen on its own and wander around and then it comes back and hands you a new job.

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of how I just feel about life and projects and art anyway 'cause, I don't know, there's lots of people out there... It's kind of like, what you were talking about, like, throwing their art in your face and saying, "Appreciate this, appreciate this. Gimme a job. Gimme a job. Let me design for you. Let me do this stuff for you." And I kind of just feel like that shit will come my way.

Like It'll all work out.

Yeah. I've been doing projects here and there and someone will call me and say, "I saw this. Can you do this for me?" Part of it is, I'm kind of a shy person, so I don't like getting in people's faces and tell them, "Let me do this for you."

It's relatively an ugly thing, anyway.

Yeah, but I just kind of dig stuff and someone calls you up and says, "That poster you designed is the best poster I've ever seen. Can you design me a poster?" I mean, A. right off the bat, you know that person respects you, so doing work for them, you know that there's not going to be the period of having to prove yourself to them.

Yeah, they like what you're doing already, so they can trust you to bring in quality work and you can trust them to not micromanage every heartbeat.

Yeah. You immediately get that back and forth process going in working with people. That back and forth process when designing for someone, and each side telling what they like and don't like about it, then you get the best product. And not just art and design, I feel that works with everything. You know those DJs Flosstradamus?

Yeah.

I like their music but then I saw them perform live and one of them spins a record and maybe will spin two and the other guy gets an idea and he'll be like, "Oh, oh, I can go from that to this song that I got in my head," and he takes over and then the other guy let's that guy do his thing for a little bit and then he gets an idea and they just go back and forth and it's just…it was just amazing to watch these two interacting behind the controls.

Yeah, that's really cool.

And they played some shit that I hadn't listened to in years that I was, like, that song, "wow." They played the Offspring and I was impressed with that.

Right, right. Jesus, the Offspring. I haven't thought of them in about a decade.

They were the second CD I ever bought, right behind Green Day's Dookie.

Quality nostalgia material.

Yea, which, I believe was the first CD that everybody in this generation bought.

Yeah, everybody had it. It was…It was so stupid. So was the end of the BIKE era?

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And, I mean, BIKE is still happening. I'm still doing bits and pieces for it still.

What are you doing now for it?

I'm trying to move poster designs into t-shirt designs. I mean, it's nothing big, but it's just kind of like, I do little stuff for them every once in a while.

Cool, cool. So tell me about the birth of the "5K" video and, like, how'd that come about?

You mean "Yea Yeah"?

Yes, that's clearly what I meant.

Okay. Um, Kim called…

So, wait, Colin did the other one?

Colin did "5K," the one with all the blood. I did the one with the food.

Do you guys work collectively a lot?

No. I mean, we're starting to more and more, but he did "5K" completely on his own.

"Yea Yeah" was the same thing. For "5K," I was in Utah when he shot it, so I couldn't help out with it a lot. But for "Yea Yeah" there was more of a collaboration. Once the design was sealed, he actually was the determining factor on how the video ended.

Really?

Yeah. So his opinion was definitely present. Both Matt and I respect his opinion.

For the 'Yea Yeah' concept they played a show in Houston, and people had started feeding them pizza while they played and throwing pizza at them. So, feeding them pizza and throwing pizza at them led them to want to do a food fight video and then Matt wanted to do a video in an all white room, just 'cause like their live show, to see them play off of each other was so important, he wanted it to be really simple. "Alright, this is who we are. There's nothing else. We're just in a white room. This is who we are." So Matt put the two and two together and then they pretty much asked me to help them because they felt I was the only person they knew who was organized enough to make it happen and in a short period of time.

That's cool.

So Matt's a video guy, so Matt and I keep going back and forth, just discussing ideas. "Okay, how can I take this to another level? Okay, the first chorus, there's a little bit of food. The second chorus, there's more food. There's food in between, but, what else happens?" And it's just kind of bounced back and forth between us and then one night, kind of close to shooting, we realize we really need to figure all this out. My friend Noah called me up and said he wanted to talk to me about the video. Noah's a graphic designer and a good idea man.

His first thought was, one chorus had to have all red food and the next one had to have all yellow food and the next one all green food and there had to be a color scheme that looked and I was just like, "It's not really about a color scheme." So, we just talked back and forth and, um, I talked to another friend, Alex, his roommate, and we're all talking about it and Alex was like, "You should just have people dress up in food costumes and fight each other, like playing around and put it in slow motion," and I was like, "No, we can't do that." But the food costume stuck with me and the next time I talked to Matt, "This is what we're going to do – first chorus, some food. Second chorus, a lot of food. Third chorus, you guys get tackled by people in food costumes," and Matt was kind of like a "well, maybe." But then, soon after, Matt called me and was like, "Food costumes."

Smart guy.

Yep. So, we kind of started talking about it and I was like, "Matt, just think about it. Imagine, like, you're playing around and then a giant banana just comes out of the side of the screen and takes out all of the instruments." The obvious thing is the "what the fuck" factor. When I showed it to people, it was definitely the first response people give if they're just watching. "Okay, food fight. Alrighty, well, where is this? What the fuck? Is that a banana?" Yeah, and it's a pizza too and a taco.

So, and the video was done quick, we did it in two days. Kim painted the sets. Matt and I helped her out with that. All three of us just set up the whole thing and hung out and did a lot of work in two days and then the video shoot was on the second day and everybody came and it was complete chaos 'till the shoot. We were completely confused as to how everything was going to work. I mean, the choreography of food being thrown from one side of the camera then the other and going back and forth and gets faster and then it gets slower. Getting the timing right was a lot of work.

Was it done in one take?

Yeah, and it's one take so we couldn't stop and say, "Okay, on this one you're going to throw a tomato, alright? On this take you guys are gonna throw a cream pie.

Right. It's not like you get a lot of second chances with a white room.

Yeah, really. It's pretty much like if you're aiming for the head and you miss the head, alrighty, that's it. I had to make a little movie which would easily show who's suppose to throw from each side, which ended up completely backfiring and not working at all.

What, you had a video for the video?

I had a video that just said "3…2…1 left, 3…2…1 right."

So, wait, you had a video playing for the crew?

Throwing the food.

Really?

Yeah, it ended up not working 'cause I ended up putting way too much food in there and it just got way too confusing and we couldn't use it, so, 'cause it would be like "3…2…1 right," but when the two started, I'd have another food in the air and it ended just being, like, four things on the screen at once. It just… it got way too confusing so it ended up just me being like, "Alright, tomato!" Just me having to yell at the top of my lungs because we're playing the song as loud as possible. So I'm just there yelling at the top of my lungs, "Tomato! Cream pie! Spaghetti!" and it ended up just being that, eventually, we did enough takes with socks that we kind of got an idea of back and forth.

Okay, so you first did a mimed practice run?

Yeah, we did a mimed run with socks and shoes and just other things.

You just rehearsed with that?

Yeah, and for the actual take, it came down to us just being… everyone was just getting stressed out 'cause we have been there longer than we told everyone it was gonna be, and we still wanted the vibe of Matt & Kin being happy but Matt & Kim were both getting stressed out. I mean, we were working for the past three days.

We finally had all the cameras set up and everything going like, "Alright, let's do this." If we're going to do this, let's do it now and everybody there was just kind of like, "Wait, we're actually going to do this? Alright. Let's go."

Also, we filmed a secret video, with Matt in a banana suit and Kim in the taco, just to relieve some tension in the room and to see them go nuts in a banana costume and a taco costume.

Thats great. How did you meet Colin? How did you team up with him?

Colin and I were in the same year at Pratt and our freshman year, we were both in the same film 101 class and at the end of the semester, I think, we just kind of had mutual admiration for each other. Colin just expressed it more. He saw me on campus and told me he thought I was going to be incredibly successful and do a lot with my life and I was kind of like, "Thanks, man. That's awesome. I like your style." I was just flabbergasted. I didn't have a good response but eventually I told him later, "Yo, man. I think your stuff blows my stuff away. Like, I think you're gonna do a lot with your life." And we ended up being in the dorm, on the same floor. We were next to each other.

Neighbors.

Yeah, neighbors on the floor. So we pretty much talked to each other all the time.

It's so huge when someone you respect just pays you a compliment out of nowhere and lets you know that they're on the same page. That they feel that admiration for you... Jesus. It's like getting hit with a ton of bricks.

Yeah, it's like compliments are nice but when it's someone you think…

Someone who you've been trying to find the right way to compliment, just beats you to it. It's a huge, huge thing. That's awesome.

Yeah, and so, Colin slept on my floor for two months when he came back to New York this year and I mean, we just talked to each other, late night phone calls, heavy breathing. Hopefully, he's coming back when he ends his sublet this January.

Where's he staying at?

At Kim's and Matt's house while they're on tour. It all comes back.

Well, it's a small community. So whose shit are you into right now?

I never remember the answers to those questions. I guess for the sake of shoutouts: Word up to my Mom and her new clothing line, Nic and Zoe. Props to my sisters: Zoe, stay in school; Rebecca, stay married; Raquel, stay out of trouble. I'm amazed by The Long Now Foundation... I mean I'm always into people's stuff but when people ask me that question and my mind draws a blank, I always just cover with something like, "I don't like art."

I'm always into Irving Penn, both his paintings and photography. André Sarano. He did "Piss Christ." He took this little crucifix he bought for a dollar and put it in a jar of his own piss and took the most beautiful photographs of a cross ever and it was one of those photographs at the New York show that got shut down by the state. I've always been into his stuff, I forget, what exactly his nationality is, but I want to say he's part African-American, part from somewhere in South America. He went and photographed KKK members. The photographs are amazing on their own but to think that these guys who despise anything that's not white are letting themselves get photographed by everything they hate is pretty phenomenal.

He should've worn a yarmulke. That could only have helped matters.

Yeah. [laughs]  Oh and I mean, obviously, I'm into Matt & Kim.

Tell me more about the Long Now Foundation you mentioned earlier.

The Long Now Foundation is out of San Francisco and is started in part by a guy I really look up to. This guy, Danny Hillis, is just a, I guess I would call him a scientist, and he's an old family friend. I guess I'll get the terminology right later but he's credited with kind of making the modern computer. So, before him, computers, just if you wanted a faster computer, you made it bigger. You got a bigger room to fit your bigger computer in and he came up with the idea of multi-parallel processing that why have one bigger computer do the job when you have two small computers do it and led technology in the direction of getting smaller instead of getting bigger. And so, he's a family friend and I've always just, he was kind of on a pedestal for a long time to me, just a really smart guy that's cool, does amazing stuff and then I interned at his company in Los Angeles after my freshman year at college and just, it was good because I hung out and worked with all the scientists and it was hanging out with all these smart people and then hanging out with them outside of work and then realizing they were normal people that happened to be really smart and then their job is that they're really smart. It kinda, it didn't remove them from a pedestal but maybe it brought my pedestal up a little bit higher.

Well, it humanized them, at any rate. They're still incredible humans but it's not longer that they're these abstract god figures.

Yeah, so besides looking at art websites everyday, I also look at science websites everyday just cause the stuff that people do in science just blows my mind. I don't have the capacity to understand all of it but it is, like, that guy did that. I don't know how he did that. I'm not even trying to understand it. That's amazing.

Happy someone's doing it.

Yeah, I mean, good for you. Oh and Danny Hillis, he conceived a clock that will tick for 10,000 years. It will tick or chime every 12 hours. For 10,000 years.

I mean, how does it?

It's completely self-powered. It requires, once the final one is built and even though the prototypes built at this point require no humans to tick for 10,000 years, the part of the concept is that they will survive on their own but it will thrive on love, They will survive on its own, the clock will survive on its own but it will thrive on love, so if you're helping out the clock and you're fixing it and like, helping it out with it, it will tick much better, so much smoother. But it does have the capacity to make it through on their own.

That's awesome.

So it's the 10,000 year clock and I got to photograph the metallic objects earlier this year and I was just so happy that I could go in there, close the gallery windows, and photograph these metallic objects for two days. Tthey do other stuff, too. They, uh, made the Rosetta Stone Project, it's got enough information about every language that anybody that finds it could find it and understand.

Is it that thing they threw into space?

I think one of them is in space. Um, it's about this big. (gestures at the size of a large grapefruit.)  It's like the size…

Is it, like, a weight almost? Is it the size of like, a hand?

No. It's a sphere. It's about the size of a hand fold or two hands put together and one side is the text, which is micro-engraved, and they have every single language up there and these have different languages and everything and it's this big and the stuff that they're working on just blows my mind. So big ups to them.

Alright, so I'll ask you the death question, unless there is another one? Is there another standard question we ask?

In terms of the death question, I almost…I got hit by a car once.

I'll give you a broader explanation of what the death question is: tell us a time where you either thought you were going to be killed or got away with something or did something incredibly embarrassing that you want at least one more person to know about it.

I stabbed my older sister in the head with a knife.

What?

You heard me.

When was that and why?

At the age of one.

And how old was she?

She was 7 or 8 years older than me.

Okay, so she was 8 or 9?

Yeah, she was somewhere around that old. We were in Bangkok because my mom does fashion. She traveled the world and we got to go to the factories that make the clothes and we got to go look… whatever… we were in Bangkok and I think it was the first day we had gotten there and my mom and day had just got us all back at the hotel and just wanted to sit me in front of the TV, turn it on and find the only English channel on TV that's playing Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock.

No!

Yeah and I'm… they're exhausted. They just kind of thought I'll look at it but he's one, he's not gonna understand anything. It's just going to be images to him. And that night goes through, we all go to bed and I wake up the next morning and in all hotels over there, they have fruit baskets and some silverware. I wander over to the fruit basket, take out the fruit knife or the butter knife or whatever knife was in the basket and then hobbled or crawled or however I was walking at that point, made my way to my older sister and stabbed her in the forehead.

How deep did it go?

I mean, it's on the forehead, so it doesn't go that deep but also, I don't remember any of this either. But, I've been told there has been blood gushing everywhere, sheets stained, people yelling, freaking out.

So there's the question, is she wearing the scar today?

She had a dimple there for a long time. I think the thing about any cut on the face is that it bleeds excessively for such a small wound. So it ended. It's a fruit knife to the forehead. It didn't do much damage but I mean she had a scar for a while that turned into a dimple that, at this point, just faded away, so I think I managed to stab her at the median of her face, like, right in the middle, right where a dimple would look good.

I can't see a dimple looking that fantastic on the forehead anywhere.

Well, it wasn't so much a dimple as much as she would have a forehead non-wrinkle. It wouldn't crease. It wouldn't wrinkle. It would just create a dimple.

Oh, so you created a fissure point. That's cool. Okay, well done.

Yeah.

Is there any shit you got away with that you would like one more person to know about? Maybe do anything that really balls out that, like, you can't believe you got away with?

Um, the stuff I don't know how many people know about is, well, my friends and I started a forest fire once. I don't know. Wow, maybe I shouldn't go into that.

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Well, tell me about the shirts.

I'm trying to start a T-shirt company. I'm trying to make T-shirts that I think I would buy. The T-shirts, at this point, that I made are all stencils of offensive words or just words not accepted into day to day diction by your average person, spelled out phonetically.

And offensively.

And offensively and kinda of jumbled so you don't really see it at first. You kind of have to pay somewhat attention to what is on there. And I guess the only goal of the T-shirts is to get photographs of middle schoolers wearing them with their teachers. So, just to get them out to a broad enough audience that some middle school kid from the middle of nowhere will send me a photograph of him with his teacher and the teacher has no idea what's going on.

That's awesome.

Like a 14-year-old kid with a T-shirt that phonetically spells out the word "fuck" and his teacher is smiling. That's the only large goal for that project. Other than that, it's just to get some T-shirts together and see if people want them. And well, the other goal is to raise money for charity. A lot of money from each t-shirt will go to good organizations. So when the kid gets yelled at in school for having the shirt on, he can say he is wearing it for brain cancer reasearch, and maybe, just maybe, start a conversation... and hopefully
not get in as much trouble.

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Videos

"Yea Yeah" original video
"Yea Yeah" Chief Mag exclusive alternate

Website

www.ennseetee.com

Photos

Nick Chatfield-Taylor
Ed Zipco

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