IN DEPTH: Menomena "Rotten Hell"

I said it before, I'll say it again. Slo-mo makes everything look better, grander, cooler. Take a food fight, for example. It's juvenile beyond belief and has been played out since at least 1978, when John "Bluto" Blutarsky impersonated a zit and then began filmdom's greatest culinary battle. Enter music video newcomers War And Julius who wisely realized that the only way to save the food fight was with glorious slow motion filmwork that elevates each salvo as if it were part of an epic battle or glorious ballet. That battle of rotten food makes up the video for Menomena's "Rotten Hell." The partnership of War And Julius were kind enough to let us in on the nastiness required to create something so beautiful.

War And Julius, directors: "Who doesn't like a good old fashioned food fight? No one... So, we decided to resurrect the cliche with high speed video technology, allowing us to match the rhythmic ploddings of the band's killer anthem with a slow motion barrage of hypnotic anti-war imagery that we hoped, in the end, would be something all our own.

All the carnage was left to bake for hours under 25,000 watts of lighting and produced what may possibly have been one of the worst smells EVER produced. We were fortunate to have witnessed only two fits of olfactory induced vomiting the entire day. You should be thankful that Smell-o-Vision never caught on."

Menomena "Rotten Hell" (Barsuk)
War And Julius, directors | Jenna Felling, producer | Smuggler, production co | David Rodriguez , DP | Nick Lofting/Union Editorial, editor | Jill Kaplan/Skyway Productions, commissioner