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MillimeterBad. Ugly. Good.
Apr 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer
A real-life production saga with Kanye West and Consequence.
Good things come to those who wait — well, that and persevere. Rapper Consequence is no stranger to this concept. As a teenage affiliate of seminal '90s hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest— he figured most prominently on its 1996 album Beats, Rhymes, and Life— Consequence seemed destined for some type of solo success. That success would take more than a decade to come: His official debut album, Don't Quit Your Day Job, hit stores last month. Consequence and Kanye West had recorded the album's first single, “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly,” for which West served as producer, in 2003. It wasn't until early 2006 that they started working on the video for the single, which was built in an epic production saga that reflects how much music video creation has changed over the last decade.
Getting Out Our Dreams (GOOD) Pictures, based in downtown Manhattan, is an affiliate of West's GOOD Music label, which represents artists such as R&B/soul singer John Legend. GOOD Pictures Principal Susan Linss had made a name for herself as a production designer for music videos and commercials in the '90s, working most notably with director Hype Williams on mega-budget, cinematic hip-hop videos for artists such as (then) Puff Daddy.
“The Good, the Bad, the Ugly” was GOOD Pictures' first project, which Linss directed. West, who covered the cost of the video production from his own pocket, was involved to a degree that made him in practice a co-director. (West has directed several videos, both for other artists and for his own songs. “Ninety-five percent of the time I'm equally as involved as any party in it, including the director, if I'm not the director,” he says.)
As it turned out, “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly” would require the type of patience that Consequence had already become familiar with in his career. The concept was somewhat lofty, even if the budget was not — According to Consequence, the budget was initially $15,000, but it quickly ballooned to $50,000, then $90,000, and finally to $150,000.
The initial idea was to shoot Consequence and West on a flatbed truck driving from Queens to Manhattan. It was designed as a traveling hotel room, and the video would conclude at an actual hotel room in Manhattan. “I had one idea, and Susan had another idea, and we tried to mesh the two ideas, and it completely didn't work,” West says. “It was a very ambitious concept, I think — for me or Susan — the traveling hotel. That's some shit that like only a Jonathan Glazer or a Chris Cunningham or a Michel Gondry really could have pulled off.”
By January 2006, GOOD Pictures had secured the necessary permits and hired the right video girls (after more than one casting call). Consequence and West found themselves on a hotel-room set build on a flatbed, rolling through New York, freezing and rapping in front of two Arriflex 16 SR 3 cameras. “The look was fine, everything,” Linss says. “It wasn't that the concept wasn't tying in. We would get through the first two verses, and the last verse was becoming very challenging. It was just the logistical stuff — weather conditions, being on the flatbed.”
Kanye West
Fresh eyes
GOOD Pictures attempted an initial edit and decided that the video, as it existed at that point, was not coming together. Consequence says he had problems with the coverage of his performance. There was talk of completely trashing the concept, but Linss called Imaginary Forces — a friend had freelanced at the house's Los Angeles office and she admired its work. The company primarily does main title design for films (famously for David Fincher's Seven), motion graphics, and experience design (e.g., branding films for architectural projects). New York-based Imaginary Forces editor Peter Johnson had edited many TV commercials, but he always wanted to edit a music video, so he jumped at the chance.
Johnson soon found the same trouble that GOOD initially had — there wasn't enough footage to make the concept work. “When I got it, I rented a few New York movies and took some of the POV shots of the city and some other stuff and cut it into the video,” Johnson says. “I made a shot list of some of the things that I thought they needed. More performance.”
Meanwhile, Linss had city street scenes from Harlem and Chicago that she had shot for a video for West's single “Heard Em Say” from his 2005 album, Late Registration, that still hadn't seen the light of day. The scenes were shot with 16mm Canon Scoopic cameras — TV cameras from the '60s with fixed zoom lenses. Linss gave the footage to Johnson to incorporate into “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly.” Then, in Apple Final Cut Pro, Johnson integrated shots of kids on city streets and driving footage with the original performance footage.
Linss and West visited Johnson in the edit room, and they liked what they saw — but they weren't amazed. West, in particular, was looking for something “magical” and “special.” At this point, it was clear that the project was drifting away from the original concept, but Linss, Johnson, and West were all willing to move in a new direction. “The great thing with Peter was he was able to push aside the original concept and just start thinking about it fresh,” Linss says. “Very hard to do. So what we said was really, ‘Let's make it street, magical, beautiful — New York.’”
Johnson came up with a few ideas in the edit suite, and one of them stood out: shots of the city superimposed on the rappers' faces. Linss says an editor had tried something like this with the footage from her unfinished “Heard Em Say” video.
Little by little, the project was starting to come together as it deviated from the original concept. Consequence, who was disappointed by the initial edit he'd seen via a web posting while he was on vacation in Mexico, says that the subtle superimpose effect that Johnson was starting to use was clicking with him. “The new cut was like light years better than what was happening initially,” he says.
As it became clear that Johnson was on the right track, it also became obvious that Johnson needed better performance footage of Consequence and West. “Basically, we kept editing things,” Johnson says, “and Kanye kept seeing something that he liked and we'd shoot some more.”
West and Consequence readily admit that their performance on the moving flatbed in the frigid January weather wasn't their best. West had an idea: to shoot new performance sequences against black backgrounds. “We had this whole big back-and-forth on color correction,” West says. “I was like, we need to make it black and white to make it look as expressive as possible. And as real as possible. You can't see as many flaws in a black and white, and you can crush it and really make it intense.”
Consequence
International pickups
By spring 2006, when Johnson had started working on the edit, West was touring Europe and Consequence was in New York, so Linss arranged some pickup shoots. Her ex-husband Martin Linss shot Consequence in HDV with a Sony HVR-Z1U as he performed the track against a painted-black background in West's New York apartment that was then under renovation. Meanwhile, when West stopped in Germany for a concert, Susan Linss arranged for a Berlin-based DP friend of hers, Marco Lieberling, to shoot West in DV backstage against a black background. “The performance there was very good,” West says. “I was very conscientious of how I did that performance.”
Still, Consequence's footage wasn't ideal because of the clothes he was wearing and certain aspects of the performance, according to Johnson. Luckily, Susan Linss was in contact with British director and DP Tony Kaye, who is probably most famous for directing American History X (and for attempting to be credited as “Humpty Dumpty” to remove his name from the final cut of the film). He's also well-known for his seminal commercial and music-video direction. Kaye knew Consequence's work from his days with A Tribe Called Quest, and he agreed to bring over a crew and shoot Consequence performing on the roof of the GOOD Pictures office. Martin Linss also participated, again shooting with a Z1, while Kaye used a Panavision 35mm camera.
Format wars
Johnson now had more than enough footage to incorporate into the video. Linss says Kaye's black-and-white film footage looked amazing, which presented both a problem and an opportunity — Johnson now had four formats (DV, HDV, 35mm, and 16mm) to blend into one music video.
“I tried something editorially,” Johnson says, “and I felt like, ‘You know what? This is gonna work.’” The fact that the Kaye footage looked different inspired Johnson to play with it graphically and pursue the idea that excited West. He added black to the footage and created mattes for parts of the rappers' faces so he could superimpose shots of the city on them cleanly.
The Z1 clips of Consequence's performance proved especially difficult work with — mainly because Johnson was trying to pull keys while working around the HDV format's MPEG compression. Kaye's footage had replaced most of those clips, however. “Thank God we only had like five shots [from the Z1] that needed to be keyed out,” Johnson says. At Imaginary Forces, the goal was to pull keys without needing to rotoscope the HDV footage. “We didn't have the budget at the time to roto anything, so I just had an After Effects guy work on trying to key it out as best he could.”
Despite the fact that the video now contained four formats, Johnson believes that the variety worked. Having only two formats, he says, would have pitted them in stark opposition. Of course, he tried to make the formats match as closely as possible by de-interlacing the DV and HDV clips and adding grain. Johnson had mastered everything to Beta for the edit.
In the end, all that remained of the original concept were a few brief clips of Consequence and Kanye performing together on the flatbed, and video vixen Tiffany Webb gazing through the fake hotel-room windows out onto the city passing by. Through editing, visual effects, re-shoots, and a lot of back-and-forth among the principal participants, the video transitioned from a somewhat high-concept idea to a more lyrical visual representation of the song. West, Linss, Consequence, and Johnson agree that when they saw the superimpose effect, they knew they were looking at something special and unique for “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly.”
“It was just a really clever idea,” West says. “That one idea made all the difference in this not just being another black-and-white video of the hood. I'm always looking for some type of magic on the screen, something more than what you see in everyday life.”
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