MARBLE OBLIVION
I’m writing this about a month after releasing the new Marble music video “Oblivion”. I always meant to type up a few thoughts on this one but life has been hectic recently (look for more Day Museum releases very soon). Once again I was given the honor of working with the Portland-Seattle band “Marble” to make another dark and moody music video.
Marble brought the song to me with a release timeline just over two weeks out. I quickly got to work on my pitch and after listening to the song several times I came up with the way too ambitious idea of shooting a music video capturing the 4th dimension. The original concept had the main character moving through a victorian mansion where we see her entire timeline play out in future and past echos of herself directly ahead and behind her. My problem was that I had no idea how to accomplish this effect. I grabbed my partner from their very busy life and had them run around doing things like writhing on the couch, dancing through the room and spinning in circles in our tiny studio apartment. I spent a few days editing together an example to show Marble for approval and after a little explanation got the go-ahead. We found the perfect victorian mansion and I worked with Marble to get a final screenplay put together. All of this happened over the course of a few days and we were prepared to film by the end of the week.
As usually happens, we were hit with a few unexpected difficulties. The victorian mansion canceled our reservation a few days before filming so I desperately looked for an alternative location. Another victorian mansion in our budget couldn’t be found so I quickly re-wrote the screenplay for a completely different location which turned out to be a bigger job than I thought. So much of the original screenplay had this large location in mind, with Chantel walking into and past several rooms where we would have little scenes play out in the background. Because the location we ended up getting was considerably smaller I changed everything to accommodate the size and style of the space. The 4th dimensional part of the video became a much smaller piece of the Final Cut, The main characters actions slowed down and we built a kind of horror/mystery out of the future and past versions of herself.
The final concept is about a person that has committed suicide after struggling through a dark, lonely and hopeless time in their life. The main character is dead, slumped over in a chair and has a final moment where she follows herself through her final day. There is continuously a visual of a duplicate either directly in front of or behind the protagonist either showing what will happen next or showing what had just happened. This continues until the moment where the character realizes that they are dead and absorbs back into their body.
There was a discussion of how clear we should make it that the main character is dead and I’m glad we decided not to, we wanted to leave a lot of this video up to interpretation of the viewer. I’ve heard many different interpretations of the video and many different interpretations of the song and I think they work together really well. What is your oblivion?
Since all of this was so last minute that actual filming also got a little hectic. After 3 hours of our 10 hour shoot we only had the first two shots completed. We set off the fire alarm once due to excessive fog machine use. We had to shoot out in the pouring rain underprepared with a hastily put together cover. Finally a whole room I expected to have on location wasn’t there due to a listing error.
I personally love the final version of this video and I’m really proud of it. All of the complications that come with a film project really brings out the creativity of the group. I think the original idea would have been cool but there’s something about working with limitations and last minute changes that really adds character and interest to the final video to me. I never hope that everything falls apart at the last minute but I’m always so happy to see what comes of it.
Watch Oblivion here and follow Day Museum for more overly ambitious projects!
