DANIELS Strip to Their Underwear

Directing Duo : Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan aka DANIELS, just released a music video for an FM Belfast track titled Underwear.

“And all you need to make a music video are some friends and $40 of thrift store clothing.”

It features people dancing alone, sometimes in their underwear, sometimes a bit ugly, yet always confident. A very clever edit, the video plays with variable speeds and retiming to create a creepy feeling, along with several clever tricks including time displacement, match cuts, and puppeteering underwear. We asked the directing duo to do a Q&A, and they sent over this pretty funny interview with themselves.

Also provided is a behind the scenes video, be sure to check it out.

Daniel and Daniel from DANIELS got a chance to sit down with DANIELS:
Daniel 1 – Hi Daniel.
Daniel 2 – Hi Daniel. Daniel is a big motionographer fan folks.
Daniel 1 – I think I’ve visited it every day for the past three years. Honestly I learn more from this website than I ever did in school.
Daniel 2 – And then I learned everything from you, so it’s kindof like motionographer was teaching me all along!
Daniel 1 – And now, readers out there, we are teaching you.
Daniel 2 – Let’s get started! What was production like?
Daniel 1 – I felt like I was helping a friend out on a high school video project for Spanish class. We used to shoot really late in the night cause we had no other time to do it and we really didn’t know what we wanted, so we just had fun with it.
Daniel 2 – That’s a perfect metaphor because we all spoke Espagnol on set.
Daniel 1 – Por supuesto… I think that’s Spanish… But really it was like, you (director 1), me (director 2), our friend doug (camera), and some other random person who wanted to dance. And thats how it was all 5 nights of shooting…
Daniel 2 – We had the freedom to not focus on the effects. But rather on the actors. I didn’t want dancers. I wanted to have characters that were dancing.
Daniel 1 – And most importantly, we wanted people who didn’t mind being ugly. I feel like the media world has perfected pretty, right?
Daniel 2 – Too bad that asian guy was so pretty. He ruined the aesthetic.
Daniel 1 – I will admit that is the one flaw I see in the video. But what I was trying to say, is that there isn’t much you can do with pretty anymore, especially with dancers.
Daniel 2 – Folks, Daniel IS THE PRETTY ASIAN GUY! Just wanted to clarify.
Daniel 1 – So we decided to go the opposite route and make normal people dance as terribly as possible, and make them look like horrendous messes.
Daniel 2 – Speaking of messes, tell us about the effects work you did.
Daniel 1 – All I know is that we had vague ideas of what effects we wanted to do on each character, and then we took a full month to-
Daniel 2 – SURE SURE. But how did you do those amazing particle effects!
Daniel 1 – We took one of your dusty shoes and an old copy of “The Godfather” and smacked them til dust came out. And then we took that footage and overlayed it on top.
Daniel 2 – Wow, that’s disappointing.
Daniel 1 – But wait, theres more of that to come!
Daniel 2 – Disappointment galore! Let me talk about the taffy effect on the bar guy. So I learned a lot about that effect after I did it. It’s called Slit-Scan Photography and it’s been around since the 60s. There are java scripts and plug-ins to do this effect. But if you want to do it DANIELS style, you slow your footage down, break the image into 359 layers, and then make each layer slightly slower than the next.
Daniel 1 – amateur
Daniel 2 – How did you do that clothes thing?!
Daniel 1 – Oh, that’s the only way I know how to change my clothes.
Daniel 2 – That’s where I came up with the idea. I saw you humping your clothes off at a party.
Daniel 1 – Anyways. its really just a bunch of well timed edits. I did the same exact action twice, once with clothes on, and once with clothes off, stapled to the wall. And then SLAM, you can be just like me.
Daniel 2 – That should be the title of this interview.
Daniel 1 – And the underwear humping into the wall is a reversed shot of boxers being tugged off by fishing line.
Daniel 2 – So the moral of the story is… Flip flops are good particle generators…
Daniel 1 – We dont actually know any Spanish…
Daniel 2 – And all you need to make a music video are some friends and $40 of thrift store clothing.
Daniel 1 – The friends was probably the most expensive part.
Daniel 2 – Because now we have no friends.
Daniel 1 & Daniel 2 (in unison) – And friends are priceless.

Directors/Editors/FX: Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan
DP: Doug Burgdorff
Dancers: Ani Raya-Flores, Daniel Scheinert, James Mackey, Daniel Kwan, and Marilyn Heidecker