Skateboard toting Little Red frontman Dominic Byrne channels Will Smith circa I Am Legend in the dystopian new clip for “All Mine”, the third single from hit-spawning sophomore LP, Midnight Remember. In an email Director and frequent visual collaborator D’Arcy Foley-Dawson described the clip as an homage to the “Last Person On Earth” genre while explaining the logistical challenges of making one appear as if they really are the last person on Earth.
“I always try to figure out the essence of a song and then work outwards from there. In the case of “All Mine”, it clearly has a very strong theme of loneliness and isolation, a longing for human contact. How do you capture that in a 3 minute video – without it appearing kinda emo? It occurred to me it would be interesting to take this to its extreme, show Dominic literally starved of human contact. There ain’t nothing emo about that! It broke the spirit of Will Smith, Viggo Mortensen and even Charlton “Cold Dead Hands” Heston.
Then of course it becomes a post-apocalyptic ‘Last Person on Earth’ genre piece. Which is a really fun genre to work in. It’s a scenario that’s both intensely thrilling and depressing. It also allows you to get up to your eyeballs in exploring human nature, the internal workings of the human machine. So when you tackle a genre like that it becomes very important to try and find fresh, original angles. I knew I wanted to make something a little less bleak and dystopian than the typical canon. But the main thing that separates this from other work in the genre is resources. We simply didn’t have the resources to close off streets or have Dominic chased by relentless zombie hordes. That limitation becomes a creative challenge, and creatively the most interesting part of this project for me. I just got really excited by and obsessed with solving these problems, it’s as simple as that.
Initially I was inspired by what I’d read a long time ago about the making of ’28 Days Later’. I had this impression that they were fairly guerrilla about the whole thing, for example shooting around central London early on Sunday mornings, basically working around people. That impression convinced me I could make this work. However, I soon discovered that my memories were distorted. Actually they did have to close off streets and do most things by the book! But they geared their production towards working fast and light.
Without giving away too many precious trade secrets, the process of recreating an empty Melbourne on a limited budget requires careful planning. You have to do your research and select locations carefully. You have to work together as a tight unit – and we were blessed with a brilliant, dedicated crew. You have to just accept that people are going to walk through shots and work around it. It also helps to get some amazing VFX post production work done, from Melbourne company The Pixel Kitchen. But the main thing is, whenever you have a crazy idea you always just find a way to make it work, on some level. Again it comes back to creative problem solving. Something as simple as reflecting sunlight off a small mirror, for example, communicates the idea that Dominic is trying to get the attention of another human being. So you focus on that, instead of trying to come up with some explanation of what happened to everyone.”
Watch it below…
