Video Breakdown: Ivan Ives’ “Up & Down (Choose Your Own Adventure)”

It’s been awhile since I’ve dropped one of my illustrious video breakdown articles on the hype (you guys eagerly anticipated it every week right...?) Anyways, I’ve been out in the concrete jungle of Los Angeles shooting some videos of my own during that hiatus. This week I’ll take you through my latest video, a choose your own adventure inspired joint that takes you through a day in the life of LA artist Ivan Ives as he deals with the oppressive thought police in 1984.

I’d been talking to Ivan for a while, and we were going back and forth with ideas. Nothing really stuck until I saw some choose your own adventure youtube videos, while doing some research for something else. After pouring through all of these creative uses of the metatagging system that youtube offers its users (some of them good some of the really bad), I realized that no one had ever applied the idea to a music video. From then on I took the idea and just ran with it. Ivan really liked it and gave me full creative support and just let me do my thing. The 1984 inspired imagery ties in very well with his previous work, most notably his album Newspeak, which was a concept album on the themes and ideas of 1984.

Now that we had agreed on a concept we had to plan it out. It was a bit more complicated that I first thought it would be, but writing everything out and making a chart helped a great deal. I’ve attached the excel spreadsheet we made so you can see the planning. I’ve also attached the treatment, which you guys can check out at your own leisure. Once we figured out all the permutations of the story and how they would fit into different clips it was time to shoot them all.

Over the course of three different shoot days we shot the different storylines. One involves Ives joining the Thought Police (the authoritarian military force) and terrorizing the population, the other involves immediately becoming a fugitive. All choices either end up with him going to jail eventually breaking away from the thought police. He has now become a fugitive and must fight for his survival.
Using a majority of POV shots to show Ives running away from the cops, we were able to create the action we wanted doing very little and create some suspense. Ivan comes to a crossroads when he encounters two hot girls who start flirting with him. Of course the girls are trouble and Ivan can only survive by bailing on them. We finally get to see Ivan running away and, in a strange twist of events, he gets picked up by himself (or a clone of himself).

This video was a lot of fun to shoot but it took a lot of planning. Once we had all the logistics figured out, it was still hard to keep everything mentally organized, because it really was a mind ^&*(. Ivan and I were happy with the way it turned out and hopefully so are you guys. Make sure you check it out below, and as a added bonus, check out the video's treatment and outline.