You get what you pay for...

Behind the scenes of the worst music video ever made...

Do you know the artist Geoff Darrow? He’s known for psychotically detailed drawings and he developed the visual aesthetic of the robot-world for “The Matrix.”

Geoff Darrow’s mad genius drawing style

Anyhow, I know a producer who knows him, and she relayed this story to me. A producer called Geoff and said, “Geoff, you’re the perfect guy to develop this project, but I have to say up front there’s not a LOT of money for this one.”

“Oh yeah,” said Geoff, “And what’s the project?”

“Harry Potter,” The producer replied.

This is just a tale to illustrate that producers always say this, and you never know if it’s true or not. Sometimes, however, it is true.

In the early 2000’s, before I started writing for the old boob tube, I was the go-to guy for cheap everything related to video production. I worked out of my apartment on an aging Mac G-5, so if you needed a DVD authored, a video edited, or some photos Photoshopped for somewhere in the three-digits, you called me up on my Kyocera.

One day, an intense music video producer called me (name forgotten) who had seen my cartoons and offered me an insulting amount of money to create “like two minutes” of motion graphics for an Everclear video for their new song, “Hater.” I think it was four hundred bucks, maybe eight hundred. He said the video they shot was really boring and needed something to make it more visually engaging.

“For that amount I can either do twenty seconds of cool motion graphics or two minutes of really crappy motion graphics.”

He opted for the latter. "And,” he added, “The songs about break-ups, so make the graphics about famous break-ups.”

“I know nothing about famous break-ups,” I said, admittedly with pride.

“Well Google them.”

“This is all going to look terrible,” I told him.

“Oh well,” he said.

He also asked that I procure my photos from the internet, using Google’s new image search. Sounds simple enough, but this was 2006. To put that in context, when I made my cartoon “Chonto” the next year, I Google-image-searched “chimpanzee” and there were only ten images of chimps.

Anyhow, long story short, I did what the producer asked, and as promised, the finished product is terrible. I didn’t care. He didn’t seem to care. I’m sure Everclear was bummed, but they probably didn’t care much either. Only YouTube user withteeth67 took the time to state the obvious.

God Bless. Thanks for reading. Watch at your own risk, and remember, you get what you pay for.