Armand Hammer: Charms

with Director Joseph Mault

While there are countless dope rap music videos, there aren’t a ton of great “Making of the Video” videos. There’s “Drop,” “Bad Girls,” and “Grown Up.” Honestly, it’s what inspired me to start writing these oral histories. I wanted to know more and there wasn’t enough out there.

I’ve added another video to the pantheon of legendary videos with amazing behind the scenes footage. Please enjoy Armand Hammer’s “Charms,” the infinitely dope “Making Of” with Director Joseph Mault, and our recent discussion. Also, please consider supporting Joseph’s proposed film, Strange Kindness.

(on whether the video was made with the song Charms in mind)

We made it with the song in mind because when that record was coming out, we had been talking a lot about what song it was going to be. There's something so weird about that song. I don't think it can be overstated how hard that pocket is to stay in, if there is a pocket, in terms of rapping lyrics. It doesn’t make any sense until you're a couple of bars into it. Then, you're like, “Oh, I see what they're doing here.” It's not when you hear it, you're think, “Oh, I get this.” The lyrics, the imagery is crazy, super vivid. So I don't remember exactly what those conversations were like early on. Other than that I was kind of talking about miniatures. We did it like right at the beginning of the pandemic. Me and my partner, Leanne moved back from Brooklyn accidentally. We grew up on Cape Cod and moved back here on the 11th. And I only had my computer with me because I was going to be late editing something, I don't remember what it was. It wasn't “Charms,” because we hadn’t even started it yet. I'm trying to think of what that would have been before that. But we got back home. And then literally, two days later, I actually talked to [Armand Hammer member Billy] Woods and he was just kind of like, “I don't know if you want to come back [to Brooklyn] right now. Give it a couple of days.” So we were going to be working on stuff at home. My buddy Dan had just gotten a resin 3D printer and was printing all these Dungeons and Dragons minis. And we were just painting and just trying to fill time. You know what I mean? Everybody's like, sort of floating.

{Dan]'s the dude in the video printing the Medusa head. He's burning the car.  So we were just all in basements, doing stuff like that already. It was basically just me and Dan, and my folks helped out. My dad was out there a few times. My brother was hidden in the bushes with the pressure washer, making all the vapor. And Leanne made all these tiny little books, which to a freakish level, sell that library at the end. There's something about those tiny books where even if you don't look at them directly….that's the part for me where when I'm looking at it, I know it's small. But like, I don't see it. You know what I mean? Even when I look at him, like I just it's hard to make it feel like it's small. You know what I mean?

(on the uncanny realness of the video)

Yeah, thanks. I think there was a sweet spot where it had been out there for like, six or seven days, And it had been rained on a few times. And, you're probably seeing green on the ground that grew there in the time since we made it. You know what I mean? There was so much Krylon on the cardboard that it didn't, melt. We made it in a way that accounted for its own environment. It wasn't this precious thing. We were making stuff, painting it extremely quickly. Using house paint brushes, nothing complicated. And then doing spray paint.  And spray paint will burst into flames, you know what I mean? The more chaotic texture you can apply to something, the better it works with smaller things is what we were finding out. So we were just experimenting, a lot of different ways to make stuff, have those chaotic textural surfaces and then adding stuff like little fliers in the windows or the Paraffin¹ cover. There's little hints and nods in there. But, when you put that stuff in there to scale next to the cardboard, you hit that Uncanny Valley where it's surely it's small but….I got emails like, I think a dude from Saudi Arabia hit me up was like, “where did you shoot this?” And I was like, "brah that's real!" We've gotten way bigger fish to fry. Like there's serious problems if there's a bodega somewhere with a road that’s caved in!

(on the location_

I grew up in Brewster. The elbow of Cape Cod there..

(on the grind)

When we first started looking at footage. We were kind of like, “oh, shit, this is crazy.” What I mostly remember is that we shot it for five or six mornings right at Magic Hours. Leanne and I would get up at like 4:30 and turn the lights on. There's that shot, walking down there in the “Making Of. I think we did about 50 takes of it overall. Because, no shit, it was exhausting. You don't have enough time to shoot it because it's outside. So you only get you know, literally 15 minutes. And even that you're probably stretching it. You could do like five takes a day before it's too bright. I mostly remember, on maybe the second or third day, talking to [Billy] Woods and being like, “When's the absolute last minute I can get you this video?” And he's like, “Why are you asking me that?”² It was because Leanne and I realized at the same time that we might be able to do it in one take, that there would be no cut. And then it was just like, “shit,” like, “we just got ourselves into such a rowdy shooting schedule.” And then I think every morning we would go in and then be drinking coffee, watching takes and being like, “Can we can we live with this one?” Because they all had something we didn't want, you know? But then when we finally got the one that we were like, “That's it.” I think we were both kind of teary eyed. It felt like an achievement just physically. It was super frustrating, honestly.

Six days total is what it was. My brother was just like an absolute godsent. He was out there every day with a pressure washer, like “Yeah, I'm helping out with a weird ass project I somehow got myself involved with.” We were out there every morning.

Also, before I forget this, I just want to mention in the making of, there's two or three songs that you can hear playing in the background that are just incredible all timers. There's a Ka song that is crazy good. “We were living in the living room,”³  The first line, which is just like  “Oh my God!,” And then that other one the Quelle Chris songs⁴. Oh my god. I had the best music ever that whole time. You know, like working in a basement, we had the best music. 

(on the video’s timing)

There was a formula. It’s at the scale it's at because…. There’s some pretty important math, when you're doing that scale stuff that we looked at where….I think we were meant to shoot it at 120 frames a second, I think that was ideal. We were only able to get 60. But because it's on a gimbal, we're able to deal with some of that weirdness. But if you were trying to make water flow at the correct speed,  at that scale, you would shoot it at 120. So we shot it at 60. But there's no flowing water, there's no fire. So like, you're mostly in the clear. You know what I mean? Like, if you look at an old scale movie from the 60s, they do some effects. In the timing. If they didn't crank the frame rate, it’s fucked up. It just looks like a candle burning, it didn't look right. Yeah, so there's a bunch of stuff like that. I think we shot it at 60 frames a second. And then when you put it into the NLE, the [non-linear] editing program, you just play it back at 40% speed, and then that gives you 24 frames a second. So it looks at scale, like you're moving that speed, if that makes sense. 

(on the intended meaning)

It wasn't so much of a narrative. There is destruction. I think we were thinking about it more as entropy. I was thinking more about… I think both of these guys do it, but I definitely noticed that in [Billy] Woods verse, where you're getting a really sort of like epochal, almost mythologically repeated story “Tumble out the ether. Every Gollum wonder if they was the first.” The narrative about the woman at the bus station, right? You're getting a very street level view of the imagery in the song. And the context for that story that's happening in, 1998 or whatever, feels a lot huger than that and coupled with literally the words he's using (elucid too what goes into his verse.) But it starts “tumbled out the ether.” He doesn't say “a baby is born,” he says “tumbled out the ether.” Then, there's this “sent the baby down the river.” Like they found them in the reeds, keep the from Egyptians. You're getting this extremely multifaceted view of this well worn narrative. So that's where mythology and that kind of sci-fi comes out. So the city has undergone a long, long bout of entropy, more than I think about it being like destruction. And then near the end of it, I think it transitions from being a plausible city to being a mythological environment where the bus didn't make it up the hill. And then you get the Medusa statue and she's guarding the library. That library would be sick if it was real. It looks like a cult is going on there. That's a serious library. It’s real because it’s real material which is cool, because narratively, it’s like mythology.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraffin_(album)

2. I can’t help but hear every Billy Woods quote in his signature flow. I can’t imagine him, you know, just talking.

3. Ka’s “Old Justice” features this all-time of a line.

4. I get caught up watching the making of and didn’t notice the Quelle Chris song but please go listen to him. His catalog is deep but I have to recommend “Make It Better.”