I discussed Elucid’s incredibly dope “Betamax” with director Joseph Mault.
(on whether Joseph filmed the raw footage of Elucid’s performance)
Yeah, yeah, I was there. That venue, Mercury Lounge1, always has really, really good light for that type of footage. I liked shooting that kind of handheld, up-close footage. There's always a nice, high-contrast blue light that does a good job. So it's a good venue for that. I've shot a couple of things there with them. I usually try to shoot live shows when they're shootable because the performances are always really cool. So yeah, I shot that with my process.
(on achieving the throwback Betamax effect)
Well, again, I'm probably talking shit now but it's not like an effects pack thing. It's like a VHS loop with a VHS player like you dupe a tape and then you go back and forth with it. I shot it with my S1H, it's a really nice, wide-open, big ass 4K image. Then you just like to play it on your screen, as if into a duper. You're converting the signal into component and then you're recording it onto a tape. Yeah, so you can actually fuck with the tracking and, if you want you can kick the thing while it's playing. And you know what I mean?
(on using a similar effect for Earl Sweatshirt’s Tabula Rasa)
That Earl Sweatshirt video is funny. Like, that's a very mild edit. Because some of the edits we did of that there was more insane VHS stuff going on. And I definitely learned a duping machine making that thing which is funny.
The “Betamax” thing was wanting to start with the video one screen. I always think of being a kid and having like a CRT2 and you hit TV/Video and you got the different input screens, and then just started riffing on those. I did some, weird sort of, matching imagery, basically just responding to like Elucid lyrics with some imagery, like in the input screens, like he was in your TV.
(on the following image, featured in “Betamax”
Have you seen the movie, Fallen with Denzel? I'd have to look back at my sketchbooks, but it's a sick movie. It's a 90’s thriller, post-Exorcist movie. Denzel’s a cop fighting this demon. And the demon possesses people. It's always singing that song, that Rolling Stone song. And there’s this great scene. It's cutting between different people as they touch each other on the street, and you hear the song go from person to person. It’s a great scene. Anyways, it's kind of its whole, Samson, the biblical Samson sort of motif that I was kind of thinking about with that song. He pulls the temple down on himself and all his enemies and that's what's going on in that scene in “Fallen.” So I like that image. I'm responding in images to what Elucid is saying, Then a lot of the images are just like, super warped and modulated so they're kind of hard to see. But I try to make it so that there's some actual meat there if anybody wants to wonder, “What the fuck is that?
(on THIS IS FOR SPACE)
There's an image at the end where it “THIS IS FOR SPACE” and it's a piece of foil with like a big black dot in it. It's a test that I think NASA released. So that's Vantablack, a black coating =for optics to make zero light coefficient. Like no light escapes this surface coating. There’s something kind of cool about “THIS IS FOR SPACE,” like making space for people, but also for space, deep space. We tried to make, try to make a sort of a web from this lyric image collaboration.
(on the distinct blue coloring)
It's the light from the stage but also somebody could probably tell me what's going on better. When you take the image from the camera and just like jam it into a VHS, the VHS is not capturing that size so there definitely seems to be some effect where the color always gets really intense and also simplified. If it's blue, it gets really fucking blue and that and the blue is like Crayola blue. I'm sure someone who knows about this could actually explain what's going on there. But the compression to VHS has a real kind of intense color effect, which I like that. I like that way of getting that much color.
Cathode Ray Tube Television.