the We Were Only Kids Then music video is out now. watch and show love here:
as we grow up, we become different versions of ourselves that we may or may not identify with. I wrote this song after seeing old friends of mine and feeling like we couldn't pick up where we left off...there was too much ground we hadn't covered and too much we didn't want to retread. the masks here represent how we change through the years, and at the same time they remind me of halloween in the small town I grew up in, where we spent many nights of rebellion looking for our true selves as if they were hiding. I had a sense of lost youth even when I was a kid, and I don't think that feeling has gone anywhere today.
this is the season of me sharing more stuff more often. this single (listen here if you haven’t yet) and this video continue that trend. sometimes we buckle down and take 3 months on a video, like Break Some Ice, and other times we shoot it on a whim in one day like we did with this one. I guess that’s the spirit of this song, too. be present. do what you can with the time you have in front of you. don’t forget who you were in the past but learn to let go of it when it’s slowing you down.
thank you to my team of my friends who helped me put this together: Three Strikes production company, director Colton Williams, assistant director Seth Halter, and text animator Justin Donaldson.
Here’s a breakdown of our process with this video:
we got access to a really sick secret space behind a coffeeshop in new york city. it looks like a basement in upstate new york which couldn’t be more fitting for matching my roots. our idea was to play off the stutter sound in the chorus of the song and use that as a visual theme — to somehow represent the way people’s identities change as they get older. we see our old friends after long breaks and barely recognize who they’ve become. so we set the camera up on a tripod and planned to line up every single performance shot, which would give us the freedom to make a stuttering effect by quickly flashing the video between each mask later on in the editing room. so first order of business was me performing the song straight through about ten to fifteen times. I did my best to attempt identical movements with my body during each take, hoping they’d match up as closely as possible to give it the cool effect we wanted.
this took a couple hours, and once we felt like we had solid takes of the entire song with each mask, we decided we wanted a performance shot with more movement and an open background that would allow us to play with my lyrics popping up on screen in a few key sections of the song. we took the camera down from the tripod and filmed handheld around the room. I went as hard as I could, as always, with my performance scenes. we ended up almost entirely using one take, and I think we got everything we needed really quickly when I watch it back.
photo by zach cooper
photo by zach cooper
photo by zach cooper
when I was back home, I sat down at my desk and wrote out the lyrics by hand. I did my own DIY scans of them (deleted the background noise and meticulously cut out each letter of each word). took forever, a few hours at least because there are a lot of lyrics in my songs, but I really wanted to use my real handwriting. thought it would show my style a little bit more. here are some photos of what the handwritten lyrics look like before being put into the video. they were way more raw and rough compared to this before I cleaned them up, too.
here’s us in the room behind the scenes — getting the framing right, tweaking how my body would line up while wearing each mask once we had the tripod settled, and finally performing with full energy in that big open hallway.
hope you love the video and the new song.
a lot more coming this year. stay tuned for it. it will be worth it. and honestly, I am already ready for the next single.
stream We Were Only Kids Then here. if you’d like to support, add it to a playlist of yours on spotify.
watch the video for We Were Only Kids Then here.
much love
-dylan