BED OF NAILS - BEHIND THE SCENES — JAMES SIEWERT DOT BIZ

BED OF NAILS (2020) - BEHIND THE SCENES

This is probably my most ambitious music video. I had big dreams! It took me two years to finish.

I first listened to the song at a sad time in my life and thought it was beautiful. It really spoke directly to how I felt at that time - how emptiness in life allows imagination, fantasy and longing to take over. It’s the most directly autobiographical thing I’ve ever made - the double-consciousness that Johanna has in the video was more or less how I felt throughout 2018.

I listened to the song for the first time in the fall of 2017, and had the basic idea for the video then, but realized it would take more money than I had to make it. I harassed a bunch of people for money and for some reason was able to get about 15k plus about 5k of my own money.

Most of the money went to the set which I built in an empty school building across the street from my house from late June through mid July, coating the entire first floor in a thin layer of dust from the joint compound, alarming the building’s owner who’d rented me the space the incredibly low rate of 1500 for six weeks. I also didn’t have the money (or the back strength) to use actual drywall for the walls and the composite hardboard I got instead began to warp in the summer heat.

I felt it was important for the whole apartment to be one coffin-like long room and that Johanna would be dwarfed by the environment, and that the first and last shot of the video would run from one end of the space to the other. I grew up (partially) in the Pacific Northwest and that fauna - particularly the ferns that frightened me as a child - was an inspiration.

I bought myself five tons of mulch for my 28th birthday, the day before we started filming. The actual shoot was a lot of fun - it felt like a “big” video.

Post-production was a huge slog - I underestimated how much the opening shot would strain my limited visual effects skills. My friend Auden Lincoln-Vogel started the shot off, but it took about 9 months for me to complete it (in amongst other work). Of course the real foliage still looks much better than the digital.

I also slowly made my way though the opening titles all the way from the winter of 2018 to summer of 2019. It’s also my first entirely hand-painted animation. Along with a pick up shoot in subzero temperatures in February of 2019 this is one that felt like it would never be done.

But it was! I finished in February of 2020 just before the pandemic. I think maybe the video came across as overearnest, and of course - it fell in the uncanny valley between too polished to get the scrappy DIY sympathy vote - but not professional enough to compete with the expensive videos I was hoping to ape. I still like it.