Hiro Murai Breaks Down His Most Iconic Music Videos

It was the first time I went to the band's concert

for a band that I did a video for.

And the band was extremely nice,

he was like, here have some beers, thank you.

And then they sort of asked So what are you doing here?

Like, What's your involvement.

I was like, Oh I did the video for you guys

for the Signs Remix and he's like

Oh, we did a video for that?

and so he didn't even know that they shot a video

for it because they're not in the, you know.

There is a lot of like, Oh I've finally made it

kind of feeling but it didn't last very long.

[indie pop music]

That was a music DP, so I didn't conceptualize that video.

I was just there to shoot it.

The director was a friend of mine, Ace Norton.

I shot a lot of $500 music videos for friends

and one of the bigger ones we did was was for

Death Cab for Cutie, and yeah,

I might have been still in college.

I didn't really know what I was doing but

I got pulled into doing music videos

for a lot of friends, so.

I never shot miniatures before but I just figured

its like regular shooting, just smaller.

[indie rock music]

That was around the time where all the labels wanted,

they were asking for viral videos,

cos that just meant to them, they

just meant popular, you know.

All the prompts that we would get would be like

Cade, I want this to be a viral video which meant,

I don't want to spend a lot of money

but I want it to be popular.

It was post-MTV so a lot of ideas that went through

were sort of stuff that you wouldn't be able to air on TV

but you can air on YouTube.

It started from shock value basically, you know?

Scandalous, but also sort of grotesque and make

you feel like you shouldn't be watching it a little bit.

It got picked up a lot which was the first time

we made something and people seemed to notice it.

So that was a really good feeling.

That was like a $2000 video and a lot of my friends

from film school helped me on it and there was

a lot of people who went on to do great things.

Like my friend David Gelb who directed Chef's Table

and Jiro Dreams of Sushi and stuff that he was AD'ing

for me, it was all school buddies just doing favors for me.

[hip hop music]

I was doing a lot of indie videos for no money

and that was one of the first sort of proper budget,

pop videos I'd done.

It took me a while to realize I didn't belong in

that space really, cos' it was just my priorities

were a little bit different.

But it was a fun one, you know, I was just trying

to think of how to get spectacle out of camera effects

and lighting effects and I was trying to take these

weird sort of idiosyncratic ideas that I'd been

working with and trying to scale up a little bit.

And so a lot of that video was just me playing

with camera and lighting techniques and seeing if

I can make a pop video that still feels like me.

But you know, I tend to like sort of more narrative videos

and things that feel outside the language of music videos

you know, when I was DP I spent so much time just

shooting bands playing and making them look

cool that after a while it just kind of got old.

[hip hop music]

When I first worked on Chum he was just coming out of,

coming from boarding school and there was a lot

of hype around him, coming back to rap,

and I think it was a kind of crazy transitional time

for him so that's kind of how I met him.

I don't know, I have a lot of fond feelings

about that video just because of the circumstances.

There is one section in the video where he's upside down

hanging from this goal post that we made,

it's one of those things where I'm so caught up in getting

the shot that I just kind of forgot that I'm hanging

a 16 year old kid upside down over a parking lot

like three in the morning, and then he was just like

Man, what are you doing, I'm going through a lot of

stuff right now and the last thing I want to be doing

is hanging upside down in a parking lot.

So eventually I was just like, you're right,

that's ridiculous, we kind of shot him right side up

and then just visually put him there.

There was one take where we put him up there,

and he was just like, I can't rap upside down,

that's not something I'm ready to do.

There's something about the way Earl raps,

he just feels a little bit detached, you know what I mean,

especially back then he kind of had this mumbly

sort of drawn out cadence and there is something

about that that felt sort of not human or you know what

I mean, there is something about a frog that just

sort of personified that for me.

[hip hop music]

So I just happened to just throw a frog into the treatment

and then when he saw it he was like hey that's looks

like me and so I was like okay,

well I'm going in the right direction.

That frog in there I bought at Petco just to shoot,

and then I ended up keeping it so I still have

that frog in my house.

It's real stupid, FDR.

Frog Doing a Roosevelt.

[indie rock music]

Usually I pitch the idea and then the processors,

labels and the artist go through dozens of treatments

and just pick the ones that they like.

That's something I pitched and then we worked on together

once they responded to it.

But that one was a very complicated shoot.

Music videos are always tough just cos'there's no money.

Because it was such a effects heavy

video every time you shoot,

every time you want to see her in a room as a giant statue

you had to shoot her against a green screen,

and then match the angle and shoot the crowd in the room

in a different scale and so you had to do the math.

You had, she's supposed to be ten times larger

than ourselves so you had all the camera position

has to be ten times the height and yada, yada, yada.

You never really felt like the video was working

when we were shooting it just because you just don't know

until you put it all together.

[piano playing]

It was just like a paragraph that he just emailed me

and told me that he wanted to just make the short film,

it was like a semi-documentary,

he was living in a house recording that album

but also had this narrative thread and he wanted it to be

long and sort of meandering and we just kept saying

that we wanted people to not know what it was for.

And I had just met Donald, I didn't really know who he was

as a creator and a person, but looking back on it now

it really feels like prototype Atlanta a little bit.

I think the tone and cadence of it is really similar.

The whole movie has a sort of like existential dread

kind of hovering over everything and it's very slow

but it's kind of tense at the same time and it just felt

like you needed some sort of punctuation at that point.

[inhaling]

[coughing]

I don't know why it's a tooth,

I don't know why it came out of his nose,

I don't know it just felt

[laughing] it just felt like the right thing, I don't know.

[hip hop music]

Every couple of months he would just text me

and be like, hey I want to do something for this,

or I'm going to make a promo clip for that.

To me, it always feels very sort of like, out of the blue.

We never talk about it like a grand plan of

releasing this video when or that video then.

But yeah, it's one of our many night shoots that

we've done together.

It's a pain in the ass video to make because you're

basically shooting the same shot over and over

and over again and you have to dress Donald

in different clothes and then position him in

different parts of the diner so you're basically just

shooting the same shot like 30 different times,

and you just have to swap him out in different clothes

and put him there.

[trip hop music]

I think part of the reason I like shooting

dancers for videos is I don't like editing videos

to make it fit into the song.

I don't like fast cuts and I don't like edits that

kind of dance to the music, I'd rather shoot something

that dances to the music so I end up incorporating a

lot of dance because it feels like the most direct

connection between the music and the image.

And then for 'Take it there what I liked was

the idea of kind of a dark narrative about a guy

who's sort of spiraling and binge-drinking

and having a night and then transforming that like

into a musical a little bit.

So we kept calling it a evil Fred Astaire music video.

Or evil Singing in the Rain, I guess.

[experimental hip hop music]

But yeah it all kind of started from my initial

conversation with Steve who's Flying Lotus.

He wanted to do a narrative about a black boy

who was late for his own funeral.

And the song is kind of playful and it has this sort of

throw back Lyndy Hop-esque sort of vibe to it.

But it has this, but the lyrics are all about death

and it has this sort of dark undercurrent to it.

So we wanted to combine those two energies,

like the old school Lyndy Hop dance routines

but in a very modern and bleak context.

It's the easiest thing to film and look amazing

cos' those kids are amazing, they just bring

so much of their own energy and personality to it

that it's one of those things where I can just show up

and just try to capture that.

I don't need to contrive it by telling them to do

certain actions, it feels very intuitive

when you work with kids.

[hip hop music]

You never expect a video to hit like that.

That's insane, I didn't expect anything like that.

Donald's always better at calculating the sort

of cultural impact than I am, I'm usually sort of

caught up in the minutia of making it.

So maybe he had an inkling but either way,

it was a total surprise to me.

I kept getting sent artwork and there was a video

called 'And This Is Nigeria' where a Nigerian rapper

was kind of dancing and all these Nigerian

dancers and it's really an incredible thing when you see

people sort of engaged in something you make and

then try to make something else out of it.

Yeah, it's very rare, but it was really, really

just incredible to see.

I work with a friend of mine, he's a rapper.

Rap. There's a funny one.

It's the best, honestly.

We're all just really close on that show

and before Atlanta I'd never directed TV before.

So I literally just learned on the job.

I couldn't ask for a better circumstance,

I'm working with Donald who I've worked with for three

or four years and the way effects works too is they

just sort of let Donald be creative and kind of

find the show, so I was very spoiled.

It's kind of a dream scenario.

We shot Teddy Perkins and the woods back to back

because we shoot episodes in blocks,

so that was a pretty intense block just because

both of the episodes are really dark and bleak.

That was extremely tough just because of the

emotional content of it but also because we

felt like we were making two very stylistically

different things at the same time.

But because of that it was really memorable and

Christian Springer the DP and I kind of look fondly

on that, on those two weeks cos it was so

chaotic but it was also very creatively fulfilling.

Sometimes I'll listen to a song a thousand times

and then just come up with nothing.

It's usually all tone for me.

It's a long winded way of saying I don't really know.