Stressed For Success

David Knight tries not to get stressed by the vigour with which the dynamic Daniels approach the art and craft of shorts, spots and award-winning music videos.

Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – the directing duo known as DANIELS – are sitting in a production company conference room in London, explaining how they come up with ideas and how they achieve them. And the word ‘stress’ is cropping up with resounding regularly.

“Our process is to try to stress each other out every step of the way,” says Scheinert. “If we’re pitching, we take turns at being negative to each other. And if we get the project approved, then it’s ‘shit, that idea is still not good enough, lets push it further’. And then especially in post production – I’d say the biggest stress comes right before the shoot and a week into post.”

“Generally, if it’s not hard for us, then it doesn’t turn out that well,” adds Kwan. “So we need to be passionate and stressed out at the same time, for it to be okay…”

The creative tension line

All this stress may not seem very healthy, but it certainly works for DANIELS. In the past two years they have emerged as dazzling virtuosos of action-packed, comic storytelling, laced with dynamic, refreshingly original visual effects. Whether it’s their music videos for the likes of Foster The People, Battles, The Shins or Manchester Orchestra, or their series of brilliantly quirky shorts and virals such as Dogboarding, Puppets, or Pockets, their work is utterly distinctive and hugely entertaining – often a brilliant combination of the commercial and the cutting edge in one exuberant package.

But then, these resourceful 24-year-olds like to challenge themselves to do what appears to be impossible – certainly for the budgets they have at their disposal. It led them to stage a car crash to visualise the experience of a life being recalled in the split second of an accident, for their video for Manchester Orchestra’s Simple Math. Or to create a one-shot video of a man falling down the up escalator in an LA shopping mall (while UK synth legend Gary Numan looks on) for Battles’ My Machines. Furthermore, they are quite happy to step in front of the camera too: their short films usually star themselves.

For these, and a few other reasons, DANIELS are cult heroes to a new generation of filmmakers – the Vimeo generation, if you like. They take the tools of the modern young director – a DSLR, a laptop loaded with Final Cut Pro and After Effects – and create their own unique visual narrative magic.

But even with a new music video for Jack Black’s Tenacious D project, and shooting an ad in London for Bartle Bogle Hegarty, DANIELS are doing a good job at not getting too carried away. They even claim to be not that original.

“We’re not subtle filmmakers,” says Kwan, at one point in the discussion. “In lots of ways we’re imitating a feeling we felt when watching something else. We keep imitating other people, and keep missing that mark – but in doing so we’ve come up with our own style.”

“We’re a lot subtler by ourselves than we are together,” agrees Scheinert, “But I think that together, the criteria for an idea making it into one of our videos is that it has to be something that, when you pitch it, the other person goes ‘yeah!’”  

But what is clearly evident is that DANIELS is a combination of two individuals, originally with quite different strengths and skills. Scheinert is regarded as the ‘performance guy’, and Kwan the ‘post-savvy guy’ who have inspired each other to greater heights than they could achieve alone. And they already have achieved great things. In short, Kwan and Scheinert are a very special double act. But it could easily have not happened at all.

They met at college – the prestigious Emerson College in Boston – but they specialised in different fields. Scheinert, from Alabama, was already a performer, acting in theatre at high school, then joining a comedy troupe at college, as well as studying film. By contrast, Kwan, from Massachusetts, originally intended to study business, then moved to the visual and media arts department where he inclined towards animation – deliberately shunning live-action directing.

They took the same 3D animation class at Emerson, but their creative connection emerged somewhere else altogether. In mid-2009 they were both employed on a summer camp for high school kids, to teach the youngsters how to make videos. They both thoroughly enjoyed the experience, realising that a lot of the creative energy there came from them bouncing ideas off each other.

“The kids were excited making things, and we were excited being there,” says Kwan. “We’d hang out after our workshift ended and shoot stuff with them. We realised we were more similar than we thought.” Then they began experimenting and making their own stuff – Scheinert introducing Kwan to live action, Kwan introducing Scheinert to the mysteries of After Effects.

“The first thing we did was to take my 5D and shoot something in a playground at three in the morning called Swingers,” recalls Kwan. “Daniel said: ‘I’m going to swing on this thing, get stuck in the air, and when its unstuck your face is going to be switched’. I’d never done live action so my brain melted. But it came out better than we thought it should have, and was easier than we thought it could be. So ever since then, if we don’t know how to pull off a visual, it’s kind of exciting.”

Animating live action

Furthermore, from the start they took an animator’s approach to their live action projects. “With animation, you’re basically God,” says Kwan. “So it’s a fun exercise to ask yourself: ‘If you could control everything, what would you actually choose to do?’.” So many of DANIELS’ subsequent treatments are essentially animation ideas, then achieved in live action. As Scheinert says, “Our process is: ‘we’ve come up with this idea that we can’t do – so how can we do it?’”

It actually took five months for them to complete their first music video – an unofficial promo for Icelandic band FM Belfast’s Underwear – but it was to change everything. By early 2010 they had both moved to Los Angeles, Scheinert working as a runner at The Mill, while Kwan had secured a prized position in the computer animation department at Dreamworks as a junior graphic designer (responsibilities included “making Kung Fu Panda’s hair look good”).

“We had a laundry list of effects ideas for the Underwear video. I just wanted to make it relentless” says Scheinert. But they had no real plan, apart from filming themselves dancing around while drunk then tampering with the footage in After Effects – and they also had day jobs. Scheinert’s girlfriend (and the producer in charge of its $30 budget) cajoled them into completing it, threatening to split up with him if they didn’t.

“With Underwear, we learned so much about how to do it differently in future,” says Scheinert. “But we also learned all these techniques, what our process was.” And once it was done, the video became a hit. It was embraced by the band, and gained exposure on websites like Stereogum and Motionographer, striking a chord for both its cleverly-achieved VFX and enjoyable drunken antics of the cast. It also got Scheinert and Kwan signed to a production company – Warp Films’ UK music video division. They would later sign with Prettybird in the US, where they are now repped globally. And when they were commissioned to direct their first two official videos for Warp act Hundred In The Hands, Kwan quit his promising job at Dreamworks.

In their Hundred In The Hands’ videos for Pigeons and Commotion, Kwan and Scheinert expanded on the ideas in Underwear, and most notably created the powerful imagery of a girl taken ill after a bout of drinking – and vomiting sparks of light. Then they made Dogboarding – a skate video in which the skateboards are dogs.

A brilliant example of what DANIELS do very well – a combination of slick editing, sleight of hand and judicious use of After Effects – creates the hilarious illusion that skaters are riding their canine friends, and it has become their most viewed film of all on their Vimeo channel (a gobsmacking 2 million views). But it was also financed by a well-known beverage company who then decided to shelve it, in case it encouraged their customers to use their dogs as skateboards…

This was a difficult period, as their video scripts were getting knocked back. “Every band wanted Underwear, and everything we pitched was more along the lines of Dogboarding, which no-one had seen,” says Scheinert.

Fortunately, Dogboarding would be saved from oblivion by Columbia Records commissioner Saul Levitz, who bought the film and placed a track by a newly-signed band called Foster The People over it. Then Levitz’s colleague Bryan Younce would give DANIELS the career boost they needed, commissioning them to direct the Manchester Orchestra video for Simple Math. Having made their previous films on a succession of shoestrings, the video’s $60K budget felt like a fortune. “So we thought: ‘Lets do a car crash!’” recalls Kwan.

Somehow they made it happen, shooting in Scheinert’s home state of Alabama, “where car crashes are real cheap,” quips Kwan. He had already been writing a car crash scene and thinking how they would shoot it, but as Scheinert says: “We approached it the same way as our first short film – how do we do this all practical, but masking out the ugly bits?”

Kwan adds that the process is “very much like a collage – its really messy.” And Simple Math is simply a miracle of choreographed chaos, created from clever, practical in-camera effects, editing, After Effects cutting-out and masking – all to achieve something momentous. It tells the story of singer Andy Hull’s childhood, particularly his relationship with his father, in the midst of him rolling his truck on a country road. It’s a perfectly-pitched emotional and physical rollercoaster, and perfect accompaniment to the powerfully emotional song – and it won Video of the Year at the 2011 UK Music Video Awards. It also became a turning point for DANIELS – the catalyst for a succession of mesmerising works in the past year.

Adventures in music

It was followed by two thoroughly entertaining comedy narrative videos for US indie-pop band Foster The People. The first for Houdini – featuring the band being killed in an unfortunate stage accident, and then being ingeniously reanimated for a live performance – has actually waited 12 months for official release, due to the single being repeatedly delayed thanks to the continuing success of the band’s debut album – but has already picked up a couple of music industry awards.

The second, for Don’t Stop, features Precious star Gabourey Sidibe as a woman about to take her driving test in a small town. FTP singer Mark Foster is the bankrobber who makes her his unwitting getaway driver, while his bandmates play hapless policemen, so that it ends up as a farcical car chase. It was actually shot in stereoscopic 3D for the Nintendo 3DS game consol, but DANIELS adapted very small cameras for the purpose, sacrificing visual quality to get more exciting car shots. “We wrote the worst treatment possible for 3D apparently,” says Dan K. “You’re not supposed to shoot anything that’s not stabilised, so carmounts are the worst thing ever. We worked ourselves into a corner and then somehow found our way out.”

Bring on the stuntman

Clearly, as the budgets have improved, they are finding a regular trusted crew to work with – and also investing in more impressive stunt work. Between the two Foster videos came Battles’ My Machines, with the band (and Gary Numan) performing on and around the escalator of a shopping mall, as stuntman Tim Hewitt continuously falls down the up escalator. Shot in a small Japanese mall in LA, it is essentially four or five motion-control passes stitched together in one shot – and Hewitt did all his astonishing stunts for real.

“The thing about the song was how stressful it felt,” says Kwan. “So for us it was ‘lets think of the most intense situation we could think of’ and somehow our minds went to a guy falling down the up escalator.”

And early in 2012 they completed their eagerly awaited video for The Shins – an ambitious narrative for Simple Song, in which frontman James Mercer plays a father, who – connecting with his contemptuous, grown-up kids via videotape at his own funeral – sends them on a wild goosechase around the family home, where they discover their childhood selves in an audacious mix of past, present and overlapping timeframes. “The subtext was that James had a completely new band and one of our assignments from the label was to introduce these performers,” Scheinert explains. “With music videos, it always comes from about 10 angles rather than some brilliant story that we just have to tell.”

However, DANIELS still found time to create their funny, imaginative short films in the past year or so – including Puppets and Pockets, which perfectly reflect their mood and prodigious zVFX talent (now shared, since Kwan has taught Scheinert the ropes on After Effects). Puppets and Pockets both involve strange body invasions, the first with Kwan and Scheinert both playing real-person puppeteers. Scheinert reveals that these personal outings are not scripted, but emerge from techniques used in theatre and comedy performance. “You just verbally pitch ideas until you’re both laughing. The ideas that aren’t that good you forget, but you naturally remember the ones that count.”

But if that is DANIELS at their most creatively unencumbered, they are also about to seriously test themselves in the world of commercials. Having just finished a hybrid ‘commercial/video’ for Converse, featuring Mark Foster from Foster The People, DJ A Trak and singer Kimbra, they are in London to shoot an ad for J2O – only their second proper commercial, following their Dancer spot for Weetabix last year, also for BBH – in which they are arranging a party between cats and dogs, with real animal heads on human bodies.

“This has straightforward commercial stuff in it, and it also has some fun craziness we’ve done before,” says Scheinert. “But it also has something new and challenging and exciting. It’s a chance for us to make something more cinematic and narrative than a music video.”

The element of surprise

If there is any stress involved in the pre-production of the commercial, they are hiding it well – possibly as a result of their nerves at having just delivered their Tenacious D video for Rize Of The Fenix to Jack Black. “We’ve wanted to make this for quite some time,” Kwan reveals, “It’s basically a music video that’s really bad. It goes so wrong – and then a rough cut gets released by accident.” “It’s kind of like our Battles video if it failed,” adds Scheinert.

So there’s still quite a bit of stress around. But that’s also clearly where the thrill lies. “I usually get stressed during post production when it’s not going to end up like we wanted,” says Kwan. “It never is exactly what you want. The surprise is sometimes that that’s okay…”