My friend Ernie Fritz did a great job with the offline edit of this piece. But when this music video came to me for the online conform and finishing, there were still a lot of creative decisions to be made and technical challenges to manage.

For example, using the water behind frontman J Mascis as a blue screen to key in background images was an afterthought, making execution of a clean composite very challenging during the online edit. And those background images still had not been mapped out, so I had to figure out those edits as well. The director was asking for adjustments all the way through the online process, which was very unusual.

Because this was back in the days of huge linear on-line edit suites costing hundreds of dollars an hour. The idea back then was to have all creative decisions completed and locked prior to the online, in order to save money by spending as little time in that room as possible. We used big switchers, rather than computers,, Edit Decision List (EDLs) rather than graphic timelines and video tape rather than files.

Very challenging under the best of circumstances, and this project was throwing a bunch of curveballs. Getting creative in the online was fun, but I also had to be decisive and quick in order to avoid busting the budget.

Along the way,  I met Matt Dillon, who was a friend of the band and visited the edit!

This piece had a nice run on MTV and became one of my favorite music videos of the dozens that I’ve worked on.