See also: 2019 interviews
On August 1, 2019, Clifford Stumme of the YouTube channel The Pop Song Professor interviewed Andrew Donoho,[1] music video director for Heathens, Heavydirtysoul, Jumpsuit, Nico and the Niners, Levitate, and The Hype. Donoho talks about directing music videos generally; working with Tyler and Josh; specifics of Heavydirtysoul, The Hype, and the TRENCH trilogy; the "TRENCH Bible" produced by the twenty one pilots creative team; and the collaborative process behind Dmaorg.info and the Clancy storyline.
This transcript begins where the conversation picks up about Donoho's creative process. There is some discussion about extra selection for The Hype before this.
Transcript[]
Music Video Workflow[]
(11:44) Pop Song Professor: Let's talk about your creative process. When it comes to putting music videos and stuff like that together--not just specifically to twenty one pilots--how do you take a song and make it visual? Make it something we can see? What's your process for that?
(12:00) Andrew Donoho: Yeah usually the artists will send a small brief, which can be honestly as simple as one sentence (“this artist likes the color red and he's into 80s movies”) to as complicated as a full paragraph or two paragraphs (“he wants a video to take place in suburbia because this, this, and that”). So usually we start with a brief.
I usually listen to the song a hundred times. I imagine my process is similar to yours, where I have all the lyrics out there and make sure I understand what every single line means. I make sure I have a solid meaning. And then after I have the meaning, I want to find visuals that connect to it. I'm really big into dream symbol symbols.
I like allegory a lot, so a lot of times I try to avoid the most literal interpretation of the song. It would be very easy to do that. So I'll think of either personal stories, or short film ideas, or even just images and architecture that make sense for the themes in the song. Put those on paper.
A lot of it is kind of bouncing stuff back and forth with my producer because my initial idea will be a million dollar video and they have like 10 grand. So you'll have to really balance what's possible.
It's just adding layers. It's always starting with the meaning of the song, always starting with lyrics, finding images that match the themes and the song itself, layering those, building a three-act structure to kind of house it all in, and then just trying to add layer upon layer upon layer and so you can't afford to add any more layers.
(13:26) PSP: What you just said, it will probably it'll be helpful to contextualize that. I should have said more at the beginning, but you did the Heathens music video and the TRENCH trilogy, right?
(13:38) AD: Heavydirtysoul as well.
Heavydirtysoul[]
(13:40) PSP: Oh, Heavydirtysoul, okay great. So for a song like Heavydirtysoul-- well, we won't get into too many specifics. I know there's some stuff that still needs to be left up to interpretation and everything.
(13:50) AD: We can talk about it a little bit. I don't mind giving you the grand scope. For me, my favorite thing about cinema is that--more so than literature--you are able to use imagery and colors and a lot richer symbols than just what's on paper. You can leave a lot up to the audience. So instead of me saying, “this is what I'm trying to put out there,” there is a dialogue that goes on that’s a lot of fun. So I would never want to interrupt that dialogue, but I'm happy to give you my thoughts on where the inspiration came from and where the overarching meaning is.
(14:22) PSP: I was thinking, specifically--whatever you want to say is awesome but--I was just thinking, for an example of what you were just saying, like the car imagery. Is that something that you thought of where you were like, “Alright we need to have this in here because there's something in the Heavydirtysoul that speaks to me about this.”
(14:38) AD: Yeah, it's funny. So I'll back up a little bit. So Heathens was the first video I did for twenty one pilots, but a year before that--before stressed out blew up, before they got huge--I actually pitched an idea to them for Heavydirtysoul. This was back when they were a low-budget band. The budget was a videography style budget. And I pitched an idea to them at the very beginning.
Then they blew up. Then they took a year-long pause on what videos they were making. And then Heathens came out and they came back to me to write for that. So going into the Heavydirtysoul video, we actually already had some concepts I'd been bouncing back and forth. And then we did Heathens, I learned more about the band, they learned more about me. We found out what we liked and added to it.
The impetus for Heavydirtysoul. We were playing with the allegory of the whole Blurryface thing. The car falling apart was actually based on a short film I wrote. It was about a sailor whose boat was falling apart piece by piece. I wrote that, and it was something I'd always seen as being very musical, but never found the right home for it.
And then I started digging into the lyrics for Heavydirtysoul. It had these elements of self-destruction. Again, dream symbols: cars and houses a lot of times are a representation of yourself. Even the sound design of Heavydirtysoul, and the verbiage, and some of the adjectives, they sound very “car” and very “motor” and very heavy. So I was thinking “car” from the beginning.
I had these ideas about Blurryface and I knew what Tyler's intentions were with the song. I had this short film that I'd written that was very similar thematically about the idea of stripping off pieces and falling apart. We put all that together and then had the ending.
We wanted something where Tyler had an action where he kind of took charge of this thing. So instead of it being a passive thing happening to Tyler, you want the climax to be him making a choice. That's what led to him leaving the car and then watching the entirety of the destruction and what would have been him had he not left the car.
It was a lot of things going together, obviously the things that you picked up on and the fans have picked up on. We try to add dozens and dozens of small layers. And yeah, really had fun with it and tried to tie it into the album--everything from the textures to the color correction. Even the way we represent Blurryface and connecting to other songs.
With twenty one pilots especially, it's one of the only bands where we really get to dive into that lore and that world building they’ve created, and then kind of add on top of it. I'm very lucky that I got to kind of have a year with the track before we shot that video.
Director Involvement[]
(17:28) PSP: I'm sure that gives you a lot of time to think about it. From what you and I talked about earlier, what really has stuck out to me is that I think that the directors of music videos don't get enough credit for the level of creative hand that they have on what's happening. I think before you and I talked, honestly, I was thinking like, “Okay there's a director, but it's probably like Tyler or the band.” That in any music video the artist sketches together an idea and takes it to the director like, “Hey can you make this happen?” But really, you're making this happen. You're writing a lot of this stuff.
(18:00) AD: I think part of it is that directing is such a vague title. I’m very hands-on. There are directors like me and plenty of other music video directors where everything from the colors to lighting to “how many steps are you taking in this shot” are very mapped out.
That said, there are directors that work with artists that want to be a little bit more involved on that end. There are directors that come from photo or fashion or dance, and their priorities will be different. It is such a big title and the general description changes for every single video.
So it makes sense when people don't fully know what the role is. But yeah, I try to be very hands-on. I storyboard every single second of every video. I try to be as intentional and honest and genuine as possible about the idea going into it, instead of just kind of like letting it exist, and just having a performance from a car and having a camera just run around.
The Hype[]
(18:59) PSP: It's great how thematic and story-based everything is that you've put out for them. It's been awesome. To bring it back to The Hype for a second, then. We just talked about your process for Heavydirtysoul, but I think everybody is probably really curious about The Hype. What went into the creation of that? Where did you come up with the idea? How'd that process look?
(19:20) AD: I was lucky in that, before we even started shooting Jumpsuit, I got to have a full day with Tyler in Ohio where we went through the entire album. And again, that's very rare. I've had videos where I haven't even spoken to the artist once until they walk on set. I think that most artists that care about the video, there will at least be like three or four phone calls and some emails and stuff. But it's very, very rare to meet in-person and spend eight hours breaking down an album.
So going into The Hype was awesome, because a year prior I had already broken down the song with Tyler. I'd already known what he wanted, beyond just the lyrics and the themes. He and his creative team, they really wanted something that showed that feeling of, “We have something now and it's special. It could go away.” They wanted to show a little bit of the band’s progression.
So I wrote an allegory of like, I was thinking about the band from their roots: how they met, what each album cycle was like, where their heads were at during each. I built this base of this three-act structure of basement, living room, roof, and having that be symbolically about the rise of the band. And then having the hiatus and the restructuring of the creative be represented by a fall, and then taking it back to the living room, where it's the band trying to get back to their roots and do things that are genuinely themselves.
Initially, the idea actually had them in each of these phases was gonna be--this is very on the nose, and this is why you add layers to it--but we were going to have the wardrobe for each of the eras and things. And that would have been kind of lame! That would have been a little bit of a misstep. It would be super easy for everyone to get what we were saying, and be super on the nose.
So yeah, I pitched that concept. Initially there's a couple other scenes in there, like instead of them falling through the roof we actually had the entire house exploding. We were gonna build a miniature house and blow it up, and then have Tyler in this endless void, and that would represent the hiatus. So we tweaked a little bit.
I did a call with Tyler and Mark and Josh and everybody. It was actually Tyler's idea to do the flannel. We started talking about this idea of this interaction that a band and their audience has, and how the hype almost radiates from the artist, and affects the audience, and has this dialogue, this back and forth. He pulled it down like, “What's the most cliche, average rock band visual?” It's like, well yeah, flannel. That's your everyday guy, your everyday rock and roll frontman. That's what they wear.
He started kind of adding on the idea--he referenced, I think it was a Skittles commercial or Gushers commercial? Where you pan to one person and then there's a change. He loved the idea of when you go back and forth there's a change. That kind of tied into my idea, where I was like, we were going through these phases. Initially, I had one continuous shot that went from basement to living room to roof.
So yeah we threw that in. Again, we injected the flannel. We injected this kind of satire about the way artists’ styling and the back-and-forth with the audience went. Then we scouted the location. I got to Ohio a week and a half early. The basement became a living room, and so it went: living room, garage, rooftop. We found some other cool layers.
We found some ways to inject some TRENCH stuff in there; there are some things that haven't been caught yet. Once we brought our productions on, our art director on, we had the paintings. We have some of the aspects that add even more layers to the world, had more throwbacks to TRENCH.
It was a really cool organic process, when you start with one idea and the artist comes in. Tyler and Josh had this really fun thing that made it a lot more lighthearted and a lot more interesting with flannel. Then reality of the location changed the idea a little bit and changed the film-making a little bit.
Then every crew member from the director of photography to the production designer, the art director, they could all throw in their two cents and their ideas and things. You bounce it back and forth with the band, with Mark, with Brandon, and all their creative team. Then you land somewhere where you have a finished video.
(23:34) PSP: That is really cool. So it sounds like it's a hugely collaborative process. There's so many people that go into putting that together. It's not just something that any one person can say, “Hey here's the music video, let's go.”
(23:46) AD: Totally. I think my storyboard artist, whose name is Mike Papa--I draw like stick figure animations on a shot list and he illustrates them. On Instagram you can actually see the original storyboards. I'll post it on mine too. It’s kind of fun to look at that and see how things changed.
Initially we had ukulele on the roof, which I know a lot of people wanted to see. Then we had a conversation and had some thoughts and some ideas and decided to remove it for various reasons. You can see--coupled with small changes to go from boards to the big screen.
(24:17) PSP: That's awesome. I mean you wouldn't want the ukulele to get exploded or something, right?
(24:22) AD: Well, it goes back to like... it would be a cool image to see Tyler play it, but then you go to the reality, too. We want to give Tyler a certain level of movement and flexibility. Tyler has his own ideas beyond what I had put into the treatment about what you wanted to represent if each of these was a phase of his career.
There's also plenty of things where Tyler's interpretation might be different than mine. We make a mutual decision about it that we both agree on, but his reasoning for not having a ukulele may have been different than mine.
That’s a process too. I guarantee if you had his honest interpretation of Nico and the Niners and mine, there would be two or three key things that are super different, just because we have different personal experiences. Because he wrote the world of TRENCH but I wrote the video. When I wrote the video, it had very personal connections to my life. But the world of TRENCH has personal connections to his life.
So yeah, there's gonna be small things like that, that we agree on the final effects--we agree on the final image and we agree on why we like it--but the impetus for each of those things might be different because of my life in his life. There's that in every single video.
(25:30) PSP: Interesting, very postmodern of you guys, very wonderful. That's what makes this fun, man. That's awesome. Well you've touched on a lot of the meaning of the stuff in The Hype and everything. Is there anything else before we move on from The Hype that you'd want to say to people about what they should be getting out of it or what could be gotten out of it?
(25:51) AD: If you know your OG Capri-Sun flavors you know that there wasn't the original strawberry so strawberry kiwi is the flavor. (laughs) Turn your volume up, guys, come on.
(26:00) PSP: Gotcha okay, so he says “kiwi” really quietly then?
(26:05) AD: Yeah it was a weird audio recording situation. But yeah he said strawberry kiwi. We wanted to bury it into the mix; we didn't want the dialogue to be like a big thing. We wanted it to be a more casual, organic, sort of thing. So we didn't punch up the volume too much on it. Yeah, it was strawberry kiwi.
(26:21) PSP: Nice. I've seen a lot of comments on my channel even, where people keep saying it’s strawberry kiwi. I'm like, “I don't know what you guys are talking about.” So apparently I have my work cut out for me.
(26:35) AD: Yeah, I actually didn't know until that whole thing started that there was a strawberry Capri-Suns. The original set of Capri-Suns, it was just strawberry kiwi. There wasn't a strawberry. I was gonna leave like a snarky remark my Instagram about, like, know your Capri-Sun flavors, but I guess there is one now, technically. (laughs)
Heathens[]
(26:49) PSP: Nice, okay. So this one's kind of a question that I expected that my fans would probably ask and I was curious about too. What's the process of collaboration with Josh and Tyler look like? You've kind of touched on that a little bit, but what's it like working with the guys?
(27:04) AD: So, it's different for every video, like I said. Every artist is so different; every song is so different. Heathens was really interesting, because obviously it was connected to Suicide Squad. I had written the treatment for them for Heavydirtysoul, but at that time that got shelved and we started working on Heathens.
So that one was interesting because I wrote an idea, issued to Tyler--and this goes through the label and label commissioner as well--so they have their input and their thoughts. The label is a little bit less involved now. Once TRENCH started, I think Tyler wanted to keep things as separate as possible. They’re still great! Label’s still awesome and helpful. But yeah Heathens was when they were most involved.
So there were a couple ideas on the table. I pitched something that happened in the jail of the Arkham Asylum, or whatever it's called. I wanted it to be something that could stand alone, without having to be connected to DC if it needed to. There's actually a director’s cut I have that I'm never gonna be allowed to share. It’s video without any of the Suicide Squad stuff. But it’ll probably never come out, sorry. (laughs)
Then yeah, Tyler had a phone call with me. He was hugely into Johnny Cash playing a prison. I don't know if you remember that, but there's a really iconic photo of Johnny Cash playing for prison inmates. So we started talking about that. I was pretty up and up on thoughts about Josh's role in the band and a metaphor surrounding Blurryface and all that. So I wanted to inject a little bit of that.
We kind of ended on Tyler's point of view. A little bit, you know, unreliable narrator. Is Josh real? Is Josh not? Is Tyler a prisoner? Is Tyler not? And kind of play with a couple of those symbols when Heathens happened. So that one was the first video.
I remember when I went up to meet Tyler for the first time, it was like, you could tell he was kind of anxious. He let me know that he had some stressful music videos in the past. Heathens, because it could be stressful, he wasn't sure what to expect. So I was like trying to let him know, it's gonna be awesome, man, it's gonna be really cool! So the first interaction was a little bit hard and it's always weird to meet people and like, “Okay cool, and now you have to trust me for the next 12 hours.”
Heathens went great. I was super impressed; Tyler is a trooper. Most artists don't want to be on set for more than like six to eight hours. Heathens was a 14 or 15 hour day. Unfortunately every video we've done has been that, since then.
Trench Lore Collaboration[]
Heavydirtysoul, that was pretty organic, because I already been pitching some ideas with them. I'd already talked to them a lot. I had probably three or four phone calls with Tyler and Josh. Josh has awesome input. He's so laid-back about things. It's exactly as you’d expect, where Tyler has these very scrutinized ideas and he's very focused, laser-pointed elements. And Josh has these bigger, you know, “this would be cool if this happened” and “I like this element.”
So it's a fun workflow with the two of them. I work closely with Mark Eshleman, their creative director, and Brandon Rike, which is on their team. So for TRENCH, the two of them were very involved.
So TRENCH was a totally different one. Heavydirtysoul, Heathens, that’s like a more normal experience. The Hype, I was lucky because I got to do the whole song meeting and I already had a good relationship with Tyler. TRENCH was really interesting because I basically met first with Brandon Rike, their creative director, and then with Mark, and then with Tyler in Columbus.
They had like a 60 page Bible of what TRENCH was. So they built this entire world, and it was 60 pages but dense. They have the material; if they wanted to make ten feature films off this, they could. They basically did a brain dump on me, a brain dump of song meanings. When we were meeting we didn't even know which videos we were doing yet, which songs were where.
So I basically pitched--I think it's a trilogy, is the cleanest way to do it. There might be more later, who knows, but starting off, I think three videos is the minimum we would need to show this world. I downloaded all this information, all these pages, this whole Bible that Tyler and his team had written.
The daunting part was, they built this entire world--everything from Clancy to Tyler's role, to the band's role, to different pieces of TRENCH, all this stuff--and I had to find a way to bite off a nine-minute piece of that.
That was so hard because normally I get to build the world. I get to add the elements and then the artist comes in and says, “I like this. I don't like this. I like this.” TRENCH was like, imagine reading Lord of the Rings and say, “Okay, so don't make anything that's in the novels, but make something in this world, and it can only be nine minutes and it has to be profound and show everything and have every single tie into the the allegory and the metaphor of the album.” Like, great.
So I remember on my plane ride home, there was one little story that Brandon had written into the Bible that was about a person trying to leave Dema and this image of a flower. That--to me, of the 60 pages--was super profound. I started writing on the plane ride home the next day; I sent him the Jumpsuit treatment the next day. We bounced it back and forth. We had a bunch of ideas. Add layers, add layers, add layers. As soon as that one got approved, we started reaching out to people in Iceland to bring all those pieces together.
Then I started writing Nico and then I started writing Levitate. Very fortunately I didn't get writer's block because that was the pressure: “What if I can't find the idea in that world?” But yeah, it worked organically. We built on it. I bounced it back and forth. I had a dozen phone calls, emails, texts, all that stuff until we finally found it.
The Clancy story was something really fun. The first meeting with everybody we were talking about like how we would market TRENCH and if there was a way to open up the world to the super-fans that wanted to know more with a story that wasn't Tyler’s story. Because, again, they built this world that was so rich.
I brought up my favorite ever marketing campaign, which I remember when I was like 15, was the first time I really went down the rabbit hole. I did what you do; I did what the twenty one pilots fans do. I spent dozens of hours analyzing, scrutinizing. It was called ilovebees.com. It was the Halo 2 video game marketing.
They did this thing where they built a fake website that was a honey seller. Just selling bees’ honey in, like, Oklahoma. Then they flashed a link to this website at the end of one of the Halo 2 trailers. Everyone was like, “What the heck is this? It's just a website selling honey. This must have been a typo.” And then for like seven months, the website got “hacked” and these audio files would leak, and these small images would leak, and this little path of breadcrumbs would come across. It dove into this bizarre marketing thing.
I remember at 15, I was like, “This is the coolest form of storytelling.” It’s something where you demand the attention of the audience, it’s multimedia, it's mixed, it ties into other products. Because at that point it wasn't about Halo 2 or a video game. It was about diving into the story and trying to figure out what these creators were trying to say. So I'd always been obsessed with that and thought things that did that were so cool. There were like four or five examples in my life.
So when we started talking about Clancy’s story, that came to mind. We wanted to market it in a way that was really fascinating and interesting. It would let the people that, you know, nine minutes wasn’t enough of this world, to really dive in and find something profound.
The creative team and Mark really did most of the storytelling at that end. But it was cool to kind of like kind of conceive a little bit of how that market would look. That was one of the most fun parts of TRENCH for me: how they would be adding to Clancy’s story while I was finishing up the ideas for Levitate. It was a really beautiful collaboration between Tyler, Josh, Mark, Brandon, and their entire team--them kind of building out this world.
I'm very fortunate that I was able to come on for that. And very fortunate that you guys, as fans, are cool enough to dig into all the storytelling we try to do.
(35:22) PSP: Yeah, thanks for giving us a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of headaches. (laughs)
(35:27) AD: I was right there with you, man. I was pulling plenty of all-nighters trying to figure out what else I could add.
(35:34) PSP: That was truly honest, that really was. I'm so glad you came up with that idea for the website and everything. There definitely were days where I was like, my day is gonna go one way, and then all of a sudden, something changes on the website--boom, clear my schedule. I've got to make a video.
(35:49) AD: I know! Once I got really deep into starting prep on Jumpsuit, Mark and the creative team were running with the Clancy website. So there would be days when I'd see a new post and--wait, wait, what are they trying to say? What does that mean? There’d be days, right, where I’d actually have to be doing the analyzing myself.
Those sort of people, that collaboration was just, again, it's about adding those layers. It's about everyone injecting their own personal experience, almost like a council of creatives on these videos that allows them to exist.
Dream Artist to Direct[]
(36:23) PSP: That's awesome. Well, we're coming to a close here. I was gonna just ask more of a personal question. Obviously you've directed for a lot of really cool artists. Is there any artist out there right now that you would really like to direct for? And don't say my solo rap career, because I'm doing a weird indie thing--not music videos, they're gonna be podcasts.
(36:50) AD: Okay, I mean… are you saying you want me to say I want to direct your videos?
(36:54) PSP: No, no heavens no! No, I wouldn't dream of such a thing. (laughs)
(36:59) AD: Yeah, I mean, it's funny. The artists that you fell in love with before you were 18, they kind of crystallized in your mind in a way that they're larger than life, you know? Twenty one pilots--they're amazing, but to me, they’re friends and they’re collaborators. I don't have that sense of like you know... I'm in awe, always, at Tyler's talents and abilities, and Josh's abilities, but I'm never, like, jaw on the floor kind of situation. Because I met them after I was already in a career where I was working with musicians.
But Radiohead for me? I remember from like age 13 to now, I've just been absolutely obsessed. I think that their music videos are some of the most profound and interesting that there are. Thom Yorke is such an anomaly. I'm sure, again, people view Tyler the same way as I view Thom Yorke. But he's like this guy that couldn't exist as a human but does.
I've always been fascinated with them. So Radiohead’s always been the number one. I think stylistically, I'm probably not quite as avant-garde as they would want for the directors to be. So I might never get that shot. But, you know, fingers crossed.
There's plenty. I think like Beyonce is an artist that really cares about her craft so much, even though she's so pop. I would kill to work on Beyonce. I think there are new artists like Billie Eilish that are really interesting, that are doing some cool stuff. They’re actually more tangible for me to try to direct for.
So there's lots of cool artists, lots of really interesting ones. On the more left-field side, Flying Lotus would be dream artists to work for. It's such bizarre, interesting, magical music. And again, all of his videos are so perfect that you know he cares about them.
So really for me it's just about an artist that wants to do something new, an artist that's socially relevant in a way that is beyond, just, you know, what trap music is. Someone who cares about the craft enough that they'll enable me to make them something really good.
(39:00) PSP: That's really cool. Well, we are at the end now. So I just want to give you the chance: is there anything that you want to tell people, or anything we can shout out for you?
(39:13) AD: No, I mean, just keep watching the videos. I'm stoked that you guys are enjoying them. I think I'm just happy to be here. I feel super fortunate that I get to work with a band like twenty one pilots. Hopefully more stuff coming.