David Domingo directed Fangoria’s latest music video
ELECTROBOLERO
Doble
By
David Domingo
With a very tight budget, my idea was watching days go by and be alert in case something that could be added to the video might pop up. If someone had a fog machine, then we’d add fog. This time, Toni found that Mau had one and Fiona another one, so we could have fog right, left and centre.
Another day I remembered that moment from John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, one of my favourite films, I really love. It’s that sequence showing a dream the protagonist has in which a group of Nazi monsters appear in a homely living room and massacre a whole family. So with Toni Poni as art director we created our piano monster with elements that were very easy to get: a latex mask, an orange cape a girl made for me a while ago (indeed, to dress future cape-clad characters), and the dungarees that some days before I had seen Evripidis wearing during the presentation of Vainica Doble’s song book.
We shot the video with four 30m-reels of 16mm vision 3 500T. We used an old 16mm Canon Scoopic M camera. This old camera, like many old ones, had thorium oxide lenses; this radioactive component was used to correct chromatic aberration and to be able to manufacture lenses that were less curved. In time, it’s said that the oxidation of this component shifts light entry from 0.3 to 1. But the worst thing about thorium dioxide is radiation; there you have the YouTube genre, in which people put lenses besides Geiger counters.
With these levels of radiation, who knows? If I keep the eye on the viewfinder 3 years on the trot non-stop I might end up with cataracts. I innocently thought that it was worth the while taking the risk for a Doble Pletina video: sacrificing my eye to silent radiation; sacrificing my right eye shooting them in splendorous 16mm. But I told Mar Ordoñez to exclusively deal with lightning, as I didn’t want her eyes to take any risks at all.
The day of the shooting finally came and… two band members arrived an hour and a half late. I felt betrayed, but I shut my face, said nothing, shot them all day with that thorn on my side. I will never ever shoot a Doble Pletina music video again.
