“The video
really reflects
Jeff’s unique
sense of humor.”
Odd Machine Director
Seth Henrikson
Chicago production and post company Odd Machine captured two separate versions of musician Jeff Tweedy, often in the same frame, for the official video of “Some Birds,” a single from Tweedy’s first solo album, Warm, due out on November 30.
For the majority of the video, Tweedy-the-rocker strums a double-neck guitar while serenading Tweedy-the-nerd in a Logan Square hair salon. As the former croons, the latter receives a “reverse-haircut.”
SOME BIRDS
OFFICIAL JEFF TWEEDY VIDEO BY ODD MACHINE
Henrikson got tapped for the job by Wilco’s HQ “about three weeks ago.” Tweedy’s people summarized the idea by telling him, “we have a hair salon, we have a stylist, and Jeff needs a haircut,” he recalls.
The schedule was tight, but Henrikson didn’t see a problem. He and Tweedy have been collaborating since 1997, when the filmmaker enlisted the musician to compose music for Goreville, U.S.A., a documentary that he made shortly after graduating from the University of Southern Illinois / Carbondale.
Henrikson feels that Tweedy wields a “natural” instinct for comedy.
While listening to “Some Birds” and working up initial treatments for the video, he refined the rocker / nerd dichotomy.
“There’s a line where Jeff says, ‘in my window I have a twin,’” Henrikson explains. “It made me think of this duality.”
Fitting “two Jeff Tweedys” into the same frame represented a challenge, but that was relatively easy compared to one of the trickier objectives knocking about.
“From the beginning, there was talk of a reverse-haircut,” recalls Producer Alec Pinkston. “Normally, you have a lot of time to iron out those scenes and send them to post.”
The idea was to have Tweedy’s severed locks float up and reattach to the hair on his head as he was singing. So the video had to show action moving forward and backward at the same time, and Odd Machine had one day to get it done.
To make it happen, the crew wrote certain lyrics “phonetically backwards” on cue cards and shot Tweedy “singing” them while a stylist worked on his hair, which was occasionally a wig.
The technique produced a “funky, strange tone that Jeff actually liked a lot,” says Pinkston.
“Finally, a double-neck guitar makes sense … two Jeff Tweedys.”
“Very funny and a damn fine tune too.”
“I’ve been loving this lighter and less serious side
of Tweedy and Wilco the past several years.”
The opposing chronologies also required “a lot of imagination” that the crew had to calculate on the set.
“You shoot the real version of Jeff with his hair,” Henrikson explains. “Okay, now put the wig on him, make it look right, take off the wig, don’t move the camera.”
The results produced an intentional comedic flair.
“I really had to tell the makeup artist, ‘we’re not trying to have these affects look like Benjamin Button,’” he continues. “I felt that it really fell in line with his sense of humor.”
In the video, when the reverse-haircut is completed, Tweedy-the-nerd looks as cool as Tweedy-the-rocker.
The legions of fans inspired by the man who co-founded Wilco in 1994 seem thrilled with the result. Among them are Henrikson himself.
“The video is funny, but at the same time it has this existentialism,” he says. “From my point of view, that feels right for Jeff, the song, and who he is as an artist.”
Send your film updates to Reel Chicago Editor Dan Patton, dan@reelchicago.com.
