I play in a band called Lord Master. We play rock. Our influences are varied to say the least. Folks, including ourselves, find it hard to put a finger on exactly what it is we do. Definitely, it draws from the music and television from the 1970s. All the members of the band were born in 1973. While our memories of those years actually spent in the 70s are hazy, we certainly grew up with the decade on TV. The shows were in heavy syndication in the 80s whether you had cable or not. That said, we were equally or more influenced by those 1980s which were happening all around us. In fact, we firmly embraced that too.
Our bass player, Jim, came up with the idea of writing the song Action Tonight based on intro music to 1980s action shows. You know, stuff like A-Team, Magnum PI, and Riptide. The song is pretty short at 2:08. For the video we decided to base it in the classic montage-style intros of those 80s action shows which are about that length.
Having that somewhat basic formulaic intro made it both easy and challenging. It was easy in that we didn’t have to adhere to some kind of linear narrative. For those television shows, the intros were a bunch of quick edits extracted from various episodes throughout the season. I suppose the purpose was to fire up the viewer for what was about to proceed. Or, perhaps its aim was to quickly immerse the uninitiated viewer into the world the characters inhabit. This also made it challenging. We didn’t have a full season of footage to draw from.
To guide us along, we concocted a basic premise for the show. It was very loosely based on the series, The Fall Guy, that was about a stunt man that also did some bounty hunting on the side. The Action Tonight series is about the cast and crew of an action television show that also solves crimes on the side. Fairly preposterous? No, totally preposterous!
Each member of the band played a character on the show. Ben was Sam Stone, the aging actor turned director who reluctantly finds himself back in the action. Tristan plays Tess Montgomery, the tough-as-nails studio executive who is simultaneously at odds and in love with Sam Stone. Jim plays Hank Popadopolis, the wacky props guy. As for me, I played Don Bronco, the impetuous star of the show who is no stranger to danger.
With all that established, we were able to shoot a series of fun shots as we imagined the world these characters lived in. To up the excitement factor, we were sure to include plenty of action. We brought in our friends Damion and Frank to play the toughs. Frank served as our fight and stunt coordinator. We even got Cooper, Ben and Tristan’s dog into the action. All the shots were done with iPhones and edited with Adobe Premiere. The crappy explosion and special effects were done using After Effects.
The Norman A Normhall logo was designed an animated by myself using Illustrator and After Effects. I was going for those classic production logos like the Glen A. Larson ones you would often see after the credits of those classic action episodes. The music for this was created using GarageBand.
To promote the video, Ben and I collaborated on the poster done in the cartoony styles of 1980s VHS covers.
I also put together a quick commercial designed for social media. While shooting, I conducted a few quick behind-the-scenes interviews to gather content for this. That coupled with footage, both used and unused, was enough to throw this little spot together:
