Duct Tape.
So our friend Brian Perkins...
...had just taken a job at an ad agency...
TIM: ... and their client was Chevy.
DAMIAN: And he wrote me an email saying,
"Hey my agency is doing a bunch of stunts with cars,
and they're trying to think of good ideas.
Do you have anything you want to pitch them?
ANDY: We sort of have a list of...
very abstract ideas that we might want to do for a video.
And having a big field of instruments that were played was on the list.
DAN: I think at one point Damian's like,
"hey maybe the- may be the handle on the car door will make a sound..."
... or maybe we could figure out a way to make the car actually be the instrument.
TIM: But eventually the idea was,
to attach arms to a car, and then drive it through an obstacle course of instruments,
and have those instruments, play the song, "Needing/Getting."
It was a very broad art idea, and a very specific set of technical problems.
Because the car is gonna be moving, really the only thing it can do is...
...strike something.
TIM: I remember Brian and Damian...
got like every piece of material you can imagine,
to see what kind of sound those materials would make.
DAMIAN: We thought about what things we already knew made sounds.
Glasses make sounds.
That's a pretty- that's a pretty decent sound right?
So we looked for bottle suppliers and glass suppliers...
TIM: ...pots and pans and tubular strips
and all these things that we would just, bang a rod against.
See if it was a sound that we could tune.
DAMIAN: So it was a lot of trial and error and it was very exciting to hit something and be like,
"WHOA! It's a note!"
DAN: Damian called all of us down to this warehouse where they had collected all these pianos.
ANDY: The crew in the video went and actually gathered every single upright piano in every thrift store...
in basically all of Southern California.
The job was to, sort of figure out, how to tune the pianos.
TIM: I mean the reason we did that is because...
when we drive past all the pianos, there's like a club,
that just hits this piano. And so we wanted to make sure that...
...whatever note it was hitting, all the notes on the piano were that one note.
So that it couldn't miss.
D... D,D... okay yea yea this is good
(Needing/Getting plays)
TIM: I just kind of remember thinking like, this is kind of crazy...
...and Damian had to take stunt car driving lessons.
DAMIAN: The guy who is the stunt driver in movies, and trains other stunt drivers for movies...
...was going to be employed, to come teach me how to drift a car around in the desert.
DAN: There was a moment when, we're going down the track and...
... we're passing by hundreds of guitars tuned to one note.
And right past the fence where those guitars were hanging, there was a cliff.
ANDY: If Damian were to make a mistake, it could be really bad.
TIM: I don't know. If he had lost control, I just wouldn't be here to talk about it.
Why didn't we have stunt doubles?!
TIM: I remember the course seeming, kind of complicated actually.
It was very long.
ANDY: Almost figure eight shaped.
The pianos went out, and then the chorus was in the middle.
Then we went out for the basses...
...and then back through the middle again...
...and then the guitars sort of went out on the side...
...and the last verse came back through the middle.
DAMIAN: Even before arms were on the car yet, we hadn't figured out all the instruments,
I did a bunch of training, and I started running what the course would be.
This gave us a sense of how regular I had to be in driving.
I started to get a feel for it and realized that the easiest way
for me to judge my speed was not looking at the speedometer in the car,
but actually looking outside the car to some other reference.
So if you look in the video, there's actually red flags all along the driver side of the track.
There was a specific spot on the window frame
I had marked in my mind, that when the red flag crosses there, we're at the beat.
Instead of an audio metronome, it was sort of a visual metronome
I would see it go tick...
...tick...
...flag...
Once we had the red flags laid out, that, sort of, marked my tempo
of driving through the whole thing.
We marked each beat.
Those beats generally have an instrument at them.
From within the car you don't hear the music very well, you don't hear like...
(musical sounds)
you hear (banging crashing sounds)
But there in time or they're not in time.
(banging on car in rhythm)
It was incredibly surreal, to see all these homemade instruments.
just strewn about miles worth of desert.
We didn't always know whether was working or not
because we were in this car, driving really fast.
I mean when we saw the final video it was amazing, and you still have this thought that's like,
'Are people gonna see the amount of effort in here?'
(Needing/ Getting plays)
DAMIAN: I love when our art projects keep leading us into places where,
we don't really know what we're doing, and we're excited by the learning.
TIM: It's important, I think, to realize that, the chair you're sitting on,
the spoon you eat your cereal with every day,
those things can make art.
You just, kind of have to think about them in a slightly different way.