Indie rock band uses teens' raw talent for video
Eighteen-year-old filmmakers Cory Corcoran of Nahant and Lisa Needham of Lynn brought their vision of "antagonistic love" to a beach in Salem recently. An epic battle scene, it included Kool-Aid-filled balloons, Nerf gun-wielding karate kids, and ferocious ribbon-dancers.
In the spring the Pernice Brothers, an indie rock band, agreed to let the teenagers and their classmates at Raw Art Works Real to Reel, a digital film school in Lynn Center, incorporate their interpretation of the band's song "The Weakest Shade of Blue" into a music video.
The band's partnership with the local arts nonprofit began with a copyright question and has resulted in the commission of two music videos shot on the North Shore last month. The Pernice Brothers, whose last video played in heavy rotation on MTV2, are now planning to pitch the teens' work to music video networks in North America and Europe.
Band front man Joe Pernice, a Holbrook native, says the teenagers' fresh approach to music video-making is what sold him at a pitch session two months ago.
"For people who already are in the music business, [video-making] gets kind of formulaic. They're often made with commercial accessibility in mind," Pernice said in a phone interview from New York.
Real to Reel also will shoot the video for the song "Baby in Two" from the Pernice Brothers' 2003 album "Yours, Mine & Ours" -- a tune heard recently on the season premiere of the HBO series "Six Feet Under."
Pernice, who co-owns Ashmont Records, the tiny Dorchester-based label his band records under, was introduced to the teenage filmmakers by his business partner, Joyce Linehan, who also organizes Boston's First Night festivities. Linehan wanted to use some of the students' films for her event's publicity, but she assumed that their soundtrack music was probably unlicensed. After confirming this with the film school's director, Chris Gaines, Linehan offered Real to Reel the library of Pernice Brothers recordings for future work.
Gaines, 27, said the idea of making a music video seemed like a natural assignment, and it evolved into a large-scale thesis project for his older students when Pernice showed interest in financing it. The band allotted $700 for the shooting of each video.
"This is the culmination of everything they've learned," said Gaines of his students, most of whom he has instructed since the program's inception three years ago. "It can be kind of lonely doing film in Lynn. Hopefully this might connect them with other filmmakers in Boston."
Pernice's expectations for the teens are loftier.
"I really hope that it will be seen all over the world and it will give these kids a shot to take another step. Maybe we'll have a hit with it and they'll all be famous," he said.
Corcoran, a Massachusetts College of Art freshman who created the whimsical watercolor storyboards for the "Weakest Shade of Blue" video, had never heard the Pernice Brothers before he began work on it.
He described the song as "happy-go-lucky with a mean streak."
Commenting on his team's idea to stage a rumble at Forest River Park in Salem between a ballet class of young girls and a dojo of young boys in karate uniforms, Corcoran said, "Something that is very narrative is better for an amateur."
Added his partner, Needham: "I personally like it when kids beat each other up."
A quirky sense of humor is also what inspired 18-year-old Vicki Zagden-Gross's concept for the "Baby in Two" video.
"Everybody in the video would be crying," said Zagden-Gross of Lynn.
"The only one who would not be crying is this kid walking home from his part-time job through suburbia," she said. The video ends at a high school dance, where the boy spots a free-spirited girl dancing. But when she rejects his advances, he breaks down, too. "And then he realizes all these people -- ordinary people -- have had their hearts broken before. She's the only one who hasn't. It's a different tone -- a slower video. I've always been interested in making sad songs kind of funny."
Filmed in Lynn last month, the video stars 19-year-old Craig Targett of Lynn, who took nearly 30 hours off from his jobs as a nursing home cook and food delivery driver to make his music video debut.
The teens spent the weeks leading up to the shoot alerting people in their neighborhood that they might be filming in the area.
They also debated over a location for the protagonist's workplace and a means of making the novice cast appear to be crying. They went with a local laundromat and smears of Vicks VapoRub beneath the actors' eyes.
"We've been trying to keep it from getting too huge," said Gaines. "Using friends and family keeps it contained. If we bring the whole world in, it could get unwieldy."
Kellyanne Mahoney can be reached at kelmahon@globe.com
