Rubblebucket “Raining”
Music Video, 2011
- Role
- Co-director, camera & editor
- Relationship
- Third film in the Rubblebucket collaboration, alongside Came Out of a Lady and Down in the Yards
- Target
- An honest portrait of life as an independent band on the road — shot from inside the tour, not staged as one
- Constraints
- 2011 · filmed on a working tour, so the schedule belongs to the shows · no crew beyond the people already in the van · the subject is mostly waiting, which is the hardest thing to film and the truest thing about touring
- Force fielded
- Nick Charney Kaye and Dave Cole — shooting, direction and edit; Dan Zimmer — additional shooting; Abe Ferraro — the performance art piece in the boxing ring
- Time-to-dispatch
- Shot on tour and delivered 2011
- Result
- A released music video and tour document for Rubblebucket — watch it on YouTube — and the third film of the band collaboration
- Principal
- Rubblebucket
We joined our good friends Rubblebucket early in their career for a brief tour, and made this intimate portrait of life as an independent rock band on the road. We don’t think people appreciate how much time an indy spends in their tour van.
Unit: the tour itself. The crew rode in it.
Principal location: the van. This is not a joke; it is the majority of the footage and the majority of the job.
Guest artwork: a performance piece in a boxing ring, by Abe Ferraro.
Shot, directed & edited by: Nick Charney Kaye and Dave Cole.
Additional shooting: Dan Zimmer.
The third Rubblebucket film, and the honest one
The other two videos from this collaboration are spectacles. “Came Out of a Lady” builds a cosmology out of a hand-sewn spandex membrane and animates it into orbit; “Down in the Yards” puts Juilliard dancers in a graveyard and ends them caked in mud. This one is the van.
That is the correct third move and it was not the obvious one. A band’s spectacle videos sell the band; a tour document tells you what the spectacle costs. The unglamorous arithmetic of independent music — hours in a vehicle per minute on a stage — is the actual texture of that career, and almost nobody films it because there is no climax in it. “We don’t think people appreciate how much time an indy spends in their tour van” is a thesis statement disguised as an aside.
Shooting from inside the tour is what makes it work and also what makes it hard: you are a passenger, not a production, and the camera earns its access by being one more person in a van that is already too full. Nothing here is staged, which is why the nostalgia reads as earned rather than applied.
Four years later, the same friendship produced a glow-in-the-dark kick drum head for the man behind the tubs.
Presence over avoidance, per the manifesto — and the thing most tour films avoid is the waiting. This one points the camera at it: the hours, the highway, the boredom that is the real price of a hundred shows a year. Look directly at the unglamorous part. That is where the band actually lives.
Shot, directed and edited by Nick Charney Kaye and Dave Cole. Some additional shooting by Dan Zimmer. Special thanks to the astounding artist Abe Ferraro for allowing us to feature his performance art piece in the boxing ring.
Proof: watch it on YouTube.
