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Let’s leave this blog’s timeline for a moment and jump forward to the present. Yesterday I posted a blog about the day on the set of Weezer’s “Troublemaker” video shoot. The video itself was shot at the end of August, I wrote the blog the first of September, and posted it in the middle of October. It worked out in my favor, because the video was released earlier this week. If you have not had a chance to view it, here is a link:

http://www.weezer.com/player/default.aspx/mid/4549

It is interesting to see how much got left on the cutting room floor for this video. At the shoot, it looked like they had a story they were going to tell, about how a bunch of world records were going to fall in this music video. There was a faux news reporter interviewing the Guinness World Records representative, the Guitar Hero players, and others throughout the day, along with pickup shots of the news reporter involved with events throughout the day, such as the game of dodgeball. That was left behind. As were most of the signboards explaining which record was being broken (this signboard can be seen in the crane shot where everyone is standing around the Flying W made of nachos).

Other things I mentioned in the previous blog were completely omitted or barely touched on, such as Pat Wilson playing the World’s Smallest Drum Kit or everyone crowding around the World’s Largest Skateboard. Or even the fact that a representative from Guinness was there to make sure everything was legitimate. If you did not have any previous context to what was going on in the video, would any of these shots make any sense? No, you would think it was just a weird video from the 80s when the music video genre was learning its way or a lost Batman comic book from the 1950s.

The fact the video was shot at the Forum in Inglewood is lost as well. This downplays Rivers getup for the video as well. Come to think of it, it’s almost funnier seeing Rivers dressed like that without any context to back it up with.

Don’t take this as a complaint or dissatisfaction. I had nothing but a great time on the shoot that day. Maybe the filmmakers had every intention of telling a story too, and due to the lack of time a music video allows, had to pare it down, lay down the key elements, and leave viewers of the video to fill in the blanks. Rather, I’m just doing this as a retrospective of how I thought the video would turn out in comparison to how it did turn out. It was great to see myself in a Weezer music video. As I was watching it, I saw some other people I met that day, and found myself thinking, “Hey, I know that kid.”

Also, here are some videos of what we did between takes. The kid that filmed this just walked around our tent with his MacBook in hand and captured everything with his computer’s camera. You might even recognize some of these people from the video.





This video is a slideshow of the various events throughout the day. Rivers son makes a cameo appearance (he’s the one carrying the dodgeball about the same size as him).



There are more of such videos on YouTube. Just search, “Weezer Troublemaker Music Video” and a whole slew of them will come up.

Hope you enjoyed reading about the Weezer “Troublemaker” music video shoot. Feel free to shoot me any questions you might have about the video, and I’ll do my best to try and answer them.