London-based production company Blink's association with Sad Night Dynamite began before any of the Somerset alt-pop duo's music was released. Blink director Will Hooper was sent tracks from what would become the pair's first mixtape - and that was the start of a beautiful friendship. 

With its eclectic mix of musical styles - hiphop, dub, electronica, alt-pop and more - the wittily subversive and unsettling character of Sad Night Dynamite's music has certainly provided inspiration for a number of directors. But the relationship between the band's Archie Blagden and Josh Greacen and Blink - with directors Will Hooper and Lucas Hrubizna in particular - has been especially influential, spanning their career to date.

After two SND collections - Sad Night Dynamite and Volume II - where Hooper and Hrubizna made vital visual contributions - the latter winning a UKMVA last year in the process - Hooper has been providing creative direction and direction on the first releases from the band's third collection of songs - including directing the video for first single Sick Of Your Sound (above), featuring a cartoonishly brutal street fight between Blagden and Greacen.

Ahead of the release of an ambitious animated video for the next SND single - directed by Balázs Simon at Blink's sister company Blinkink - we talked to Hooper and Hrubizna, looking back at the work which has done the hard yards in establishing Sad Night Dynamite's imaginative visual world.        

SAD NIGHT DYNAMITE (SND 001) - Director: Will Hooper

Visually at this stage they had nothing. I was tasked with making that nothing, something.

How did you come up with the idea for the video for (Sad Night Dynamite: Album)?

WH: This project was the first time I was introduced to SND. I was given a handful of demos, a few WIP future singles and some instrumental works that would ultimately make up the mixtape that we made a movie for. It painted a pretty exciting picture of what they wanted to do and it was an instant 'woah' from me.

The music was raw and intelligent and unusual. I remembered being floored by an early demo of Icy Violence and Smoke Hole (which used to be called Choke Hold, fyi).

Visually at this stage they had nothing - and I was tasked with making that nothing, something. The process started by me putting together lots and lots of scratchy ideas and visual prompts that are essentially a reflex to things sonically - I usually try to do this for most things I write. A lot of these ideas were L’s, which is to be expected. But a few really resonated with the guys and they became quite attached to the idea of having a range of visuals that on paper shouldn’t really work together, but finding strange threads and atmospheric links between them.

Ear we go: Will Hooper (above) and friends. "I was given a handful of SND demos... and it was an instant 'woah' from me." 

What was your process of making the video, And the most memorable aspect of the production?

WH: There’s nothing better than making a movie abroad with your mates, and that is exactly what we were lucky enough to do for this. Somehow mega-angel producer Rosie Brear and mega-angel EP Laura Northover managed to wrangle the budget in a way so that we could go out to Prague to shoot it. The rural backdrop of the Czech Republic brought so much to the film. Likewise the crazy talented local crew that we worked with, particularly DOP sorceress Igor Smitka - he’s honestly the best.

There’s something to be said about working in a completely foreign setting. The way you look at it is different to when you have a sense of familiarity present - I find that anyway. I get complacent here in the UK and definitely don’t always notice the potential of some things. So yes, being in Prague shooting, which was the first time I’d been abroad to work unlocked another rung on the ladder. A rung of power.

My most memorable part of that shoot was getting a local farmer to literally dig us a six foot grave to shoot the funeral scene because it was cheaper to do that than build a piece of set and faking it.

MOUNTAIN JACK - Dir: Will Hooper

My terms were that 'we must build a giant mouth'.

How did you come up with the idea for the video for Mountain Jack? 

I’ve always wanted to shoot a music video in a mouth and have attempted (and failed) to pitch it on other things in the past. So when Josh and Archie messaged me asking if I’d do another music video for them I replied “yes” but my terms were that “we must build a giant mouth”. Which was met with an “ok”.

And whilst we didn’t have the budget to make the giant mouth set of my dreams, we enlisted production designer legend Laura Little, who ended up designing such a cool deconstructed, abstract version of a mouth. “The Chaos Mouth” we called it.

Above: On set of Mountain Jack. "Laura Little ended up designing such a cool deconstructed, abstract version of a mouth."

What was your process of making the video, And the most memorable aspect of the production?

The main intention of this vid was to do some more “traditional” performance stuff with SND, which was fun because I’d not done that with them yet. So that set and the performance within it became the central pillar for the rest of visuals in that vid - which was deep dive of all things mouth. Lots of lo-fi silliness, more weird camera rigs, lots of Josh gagging on endoscopes that I put down his throat.

VOLUME II - Dir: Lucas Hrubizna

We had to develop a way to shoot all seven locations in London without me being physically present.

How did you come up with the idea for the project for Volume II?

LH: For Volume II, SND came to us with a challenge: rather than producing a traditional music video for an individual track, we were to create a series of distinct pieces for each song on the album that were visually unique, but strung together with a thread that would tie them into a common universe.

The conceptual basis for the album was a near-death experience that one of the band members had faced, and visually representing the idea of being stuck in a purgatorial environment - somewhere between life and death - was something that really resonated with them.

I started to consider the seven levels of Danté's Purgatorio, and used them as a loose structure to imagine an equal number of unnerving abandoned spaces from present-day. Disused petrol stations, dead malls and empty waiting rooms became analogues for the terraces in Danté's myth.

Above: Lucas Hrubizna. "Being stuck in a purgatorial environment - somewhere between life and death - was something that really resonated with them."

What was your process of making the project? And the most memorable aspect of the production?

LH: Because I was stuck in Canada under COVID restrictions at the time of production, we had to develop a way to shoot all seven locations in London without me being physically present, which would have been a challenge even if I was on the ground, given the tight budget and timeline involved.

We found a solution in the volumetric capture stage at Dimension Studios, which allowed me to remotely direct performances by SND inside a huge array of cameras. The data from the cameras, all mounted at different angles, was fed into software that generated full three-dimensional animated models which I could then build environments around at home in Toronto.

Above: Volume II's greenscreen shoot. "The sensation of becoming a disembodied voice on an actual working film set an entire ocean away was just plain bizarre."

Lighting, camera movement and blocking were all developed virtually on my end, so most of the directing work actually ended up taking place in post-production where I took a sort of sculptural approach to building the project, picking away at the scenes and experimenting technically along the way to discover interesting images.

This was my first major production with Blink, and I will always remember the strange feeling of sitting in the dark in my home office at 2 o’clock in the morning Toronto time, watching crew scurry around the set over Zoom as I issued directions to my surrogate AD. The sensation of becoming a disembodied voice on an actual working film set an entire ocean away was just plain bizarre.

SICK OF YOUR SOUND - Dir: Will Hooper

In a group chat riddled with their voice notes... I wrote about being so sick of listening to them that I wanted to kill them.

How did you come up with the idea for the video for Sick of Your Sound?

WH: I’ve been helping the guys with some general creative direction for the very very delicious new wave of tracks that they’ve been working on. We’d commissioned a vid for another of their tracks that’s being made by good friend and fellow Blink director Balázs Simon. The video in question is completely ridiculous. Live action, 3D environments, animation and a coked-up two-headed testosterone monster with tentacles made out of flesh and tech and amniotic fluid… Balázs has been 'no-lifing' it for ages to get it finished - and holyyyy heck wait till you see it! The guy is a genius.

However! Issue!!!! The vid is so crazy crazy ambitious it had basically gobbled up nearly all the budget for their vids, and they wanted a couple to put out. Cue me ( •͡˘ _•͡˘)ノ

When the guys went on tour SOYS did super well and when they got back there was a bit of a flap to get something out for it ASAP. Which meant the lead up to making this movie was pretty go-go-gadget mode. We had no money and no time, which if you work in music videos, is the case 99.9% of the time.

Above: On set of the Sick Of Your Sound shoot - Will Hooper (yellow hood), DoP Natasha Dursmaa (third left) and crew with Josh and Archie of Sad Night Dynamite  

So writing ideas for this track ended up being quite knee jerk and immediate. And there is something to be said when writing this way - not overthinking it (because you can’t) and trusting in your guttural response to something.

In a group chat that is riddled with voice notes of ideas and thoughts for the video from Josh and Archie, I wrote about being so sick of listening to them that I wanted to kill them both. Which was the thing that prompted the idea.. That idea eventually evolved into the two of them killing each other on camera a la Homer and Bart Simpson until their heads exploded. Job done.

What was your process of making the video?  And the most memorable aspect of the production? 

As I already mentioned, we had lil money and lil time, so this was pulled together very quickly by producer/ ain character Jack Bingham and the lovelies at Blink. We pulled in a bunch of favours and luckily got crewed up with a pretty serious team of legends. The approach was lo-fi but ambitious. We had some stunt choreo, some SFX head explosions, lots of silly camera rigs, crowd scenes, multiple formats, etc.

A few days before the main shoot day I ran around - just me and the band shooting a load of B-roll and teaser stuff on DV using this ShittyRig™ that I built that has two prosthetic hands fixed to the camera - a sort of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom setup.

Above: The result of the explosive finale of Sick Of Your Sound video shoot.

The most lol part of the shoot was definitely the exploding heads that Machine Shop arranged for us.

We used a bit of that day to rehearse some performance stuff too, blocking out some of the moments in the vid. It’s rare to be afforded the gift of rehearsing for a music, but it is such a luxury when it does happen, especially one that can occur on location and has the potential to yield footage that could end up in the movie (which is what happened). Very epic.

We shot in a flyover just off Canary Wharf. There isn’t a crazy amount of footfall there which made it very helpful for us to control the space. As you can see from the vid there is some pretty physical and aggressive performance from the guys throughout, so being not in and amongst the great British public made it easier to carry out.

The shoot was crazy fun, running around in quite a guerilla and spontaneous way. DOP & Queen Natasha Duursma made not a lot look like a lot.

The most lol part of the shoot was definitely the exploding heads that Machine Shop somehow arranged for us. Despite our efforts to make sure everyone was at a safe distance, the blast radius was so mega that my jeans looked like they belonged to Patrick Bateman. And still do :(

• Will Hooper and Lucas Hrubizna are directors at Blink