Music Videos

Directors Note:
Little White Dog (in a Gated Community) was a really special video to direct. As a big Tea Eater fan, I had heard the song live tons of times before it was recorded. My partner and I would often sing it to each other. One day, while I was holding my childhood stuffed animal Doggy Loggy, Hal said he hoped I would get to make a music video for Little White Dog that featured Doggy Loggy. I asked Tarra if I could do the video and she said yes!
During a late night hang, Tarra told me that this needed to be the most psychedelic Tea Eater video yet. She had dozens of toy little white dogs but she also wanted to be a little white dog. With that in mind I pitched the idea of “I’m a Little White Dog and I took too much acid” and the chorus is the dog reminding itself of his base reality in order to cope. “I am a little white dog in a gated community.” And when the dog is able to drop the feelings of shame it can actually embrace the beauty of its existence within the larger organism that surrounds him. 
The inclusion of elements of both Tarra and my childhoods (we shot in the neighborhood where she grew up) makes this feel very personal and nostalgic. But it’s simultaneously an embrace of the future. We shot using my Insta360 camera, a tool I’ve used on other projects that’s radically changed the types of videos I can capture.
The psychedelic theme also felt like a natural fit for experimentation with AI enhanced images. I almost think it’s fair to call the effects of psychedelic molecules a form of artificial intelligence themselves. 
I ran some of the footage we shot through Runway ML with different prompts. I found that I really enjoyed times it would get things “wrong” like interpreting the cuffs on Tarra’s sleeves as additional dogs instead of paws or hands. It reminded me of how someone in an altered state might start seeing patterns in nature as faces. And because the footage we had captured was already so trippy I had fun playing with the blurry line between what footage is “real” vs AI enhanced or generated. And honestly, the sense of play and exploratory experimentation that generative tools allowed me to access reignited the spark of creativity I felt when I was a kid playing with KidPix.
I know there are a lot of very valid fears about generative AI tools. It’s scary to think about the way it is warping the public’s perception of reality. But that’s also what made it feel like a perfect tool to tell a story about deciphering what is real and what is being generated by unusual neural connections. And by reminding ourselves of who we are and that there’s no need to be ashamed of that, we can be proactive about how we experience the world around us.