director: Christopher Sims
title/job: director
company: DNA
first video: It was for my friends' band Eighteen Visions. We wanted to do a play off of the female love story in David Lynch's Mullholland Drive. It pretty much just ended up being a chaotic music video of two girls making out with each other. It was kind of awkward for the girls because, of course, all the guys in Eighteen Visions wanted to be present while they were making out.
I shot it on HD, which I hate, but at the time it was a fairly new and cheap way to make something look half credible. The video cost $6,750. I picked up all the gear myself. I remember pulling up to J.L. Fisher with a friends borrowed pickup truck to get a Model 10 dolly and track and some PA started asking me what job I was working on and who's directing it. I told him that I was going to direct it and he looked at me like I was crazy.
I still actually really love the edit of that video.
--> watch Eighteen Visions "You Broke Like Glass"
strangest video: It's weird because my stranger videos usually involve the supernatural. I'm not one to believe in that or think about it too much, but there is no other explanation really.
I shot the Saosin "Voices" video on Universal's infamous Stage 28, which was used for the old Phantom Of The Opera. We were informed by Universal that they had numerous accounts of odd things happening there. I was eager to get a location and wanted to lock something down, so I didn't think twice about the so called "haunting." On the day of the shoot we set up a series of lights behind our main stage. I wanted the lighting director at the board to manually hit all these cues to certain beats in the song and I was getting furious because the lights were flashing at the wrong rhythm and even at moments that I didn't want any lights. I remember running over to him after a few takes and asking what's wrong and he told me that the lights were going off by themselves. I then remembered Universal's note about Stage 28. A lot of the unwanted light cues actually made the cut so when you watch that video you can see the hand of the supernatural.
--> watch Saosin "Voices"
Another supernatural encounter happened on the set of Eighteen Vision's "Tonightless" video. I don't know why I didn't think it was going to be a big deal to shoot in a cemetery and then a mausoleum back to back, but I didn't. We shot the concept part of the video with this couple in a Pasadena cemetery during daylight hours while the crew worked all day setting up lights in the mausoleum for the performance. We barely finished in the cemetery before the sun went down and we made our way to the mausoleum. The power there kept getting tripped and sending us into darkness. Our gaffer and grip department kept making trips to our 1200 amp tow plant generator to figure out what was tripping things up. I guess our generator finally went completely down so we had another one trucked in. Within 10 minutes of getting our second truck, it went down as well. So now we're on our third 1200 amp tow plant generator, which is insane, and I'm losing my mind because we haven't even shot one frame of the performance. We ended up getting a portion of the lights to work so we just had to shoot it to the best of our electrical ability. It was a long night, to say the least. I remember arriving on set at 4:30am and getting back in my car to go home the following day at 4:15am in the morning. I guess it was the price we had to pay for waking the dead with our lights and sounds.
--> watch Eighteen Visions "Tonightless"
what's next: I'm finishing some "Studio Sessions" special project for the Jimmy Eat World guys at the moment. I shot a few Audi spec ads over the summer that I would love to finish, but we are having trouble finding talented sound designers and voice over characters to work for free. I'll finish them soon though I'm sure and have them up on my site simsdirector.com. I have another Hawk Nelson video scheduled for the third week of January and there's a number of other jobs I've written on... just waiting for the word.
