 |
| Taste In Music |
A fiesty little monster movie with a metal soundtrack, Taste In Music is a short film directed by I The Betrayer bassist Kyle Sevenoaks and starring his bandmate Chris ‘NoaR’ Wiborg, also known as Catain Coffee. It tells a music-focused story and clearly has roots in music videos. When I connected with Kyle to talk about it, he was siting in a room lined with instruments, which he showed me as we waiting for Chris to join us, and he told me how the film came about.
“It came out of a discussion of what would happen to electronic devices if a cosmic storm was to hit Earth. A bunch of directors got together and said ‘I'll take this,’ and ‘I'll do that.’ And I was dealt an electronic keyboard, owing to my musical background. So I thought ‘Well, since it's an electronic keyboard and it's a cosmic storm, it kind of has to be comedy. It's not going to work any other way.’ I’m a big fan of comedy and big fan of horror, so went in that direction.”
He was inspired by the likes of The Evil Dead, he says, aiming for a grotesque but playful style.
“Puppets and masks and silicon and plastics,” says Chris, who has just arrived. “You know, all the monsters were just drenched in goo and stuff.”
The two of them have made a number of their own music videos in the past, and Kyle says that short films feel like a natural extension of that.
“There's a horror inspired video we did with a creature called Slaughterhouse,” he explains. “And my latest video is not so much horror, but it's definitely got the colour palette of the horror film.”
“The Slaughterhouse music video definitely is,” says Chris. “It’s got all the elements of horror building it as a story.”
The reverse is also true: Taste In Music has some music video elements, says Kyle.
“Some of the shots, you could say, come from a music video thing, especially when the character goes back into the cabin. It’s definitely inspired by music video visuals. I wanted that to be very visually impactful. But it’s a pretty standard story structure – it's quite a bit more filmy than bigger music videos.
“We knew from the get there was going to be no CGI or anything like that. The VFX are very minimal, but the special effects – I spent, what was it, three or four days building that model?”
Chris nods, and he continues.
“I don't remember exactly how long it was, but it was just a little plastic keyboard. I bought a Halloween mask, glued it to the top of it, stuck the teeth on, covered it in some kind of goo – I don't remember exactly what it was – and it just looked great. All that was inspired by physical, practical effects from the Seventies, like Alien and things like that. It absolutely had to be practical and in camera.
“When I wrote it, I didn't have any idea of the location at all. We actually went to visit it after I wrote it. I had to rewrite a little bit to fit the location, but then after I'd seen it, I was like, ‘Yeah, it has to be a small creature because it's a small location,’ and actually it was just a puppet.” He holds up his hand, keeping his fingers together and moving his thumb back and forth in imitation of a snapping mouth. “I was just like this, fluffing it up and down inside the back of the thing. So luckily there wasn't too much computer animation or anything like that. You just stick your hand in the puppet.”
“So I was performing against the keyboard,” laughs Chris, but assures me that this didn’t make it difficult to get into the right psychological space. “If you have a look at the thing, it's horrifying. But yeah, obviously, knowing that either Kyle or one of our crew is holding the thing from below the table, you have to picture the true face of horror. It’s staring down at you like an extremely angry chihuahua, except it's a keyboard full of teeth, you know?”
So, I mean, there's another special effects element in the film. I don't to get into spoiler territory, but I ask if it was inspired by Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and the notion of having a machine gun for a leg. They nod enthusiastically.
“Also, Ash in The Evil Dead,” says Kyle.
“I played a lot of Resident Evil,” says Chris, “and, you know, basically just tools sticking out of the body is a great theme.”
It’s much easier to make a film like this than it used to be, Kyle says, but even with the increase in affordable CGI options, practical effects are a priority for them.
“The newer technology is more compact cameras and easier to access lenses and lights and things like this. Technology has made leaps and bounds in those things. I've been a fan of film since I was very young, and there's no way I could have done any of this when I was a teenager, even in my early twenties, because cameras of any quality were just inaccessible. But now you can get a really good quality camera for just a couple of hundred pounds. But I always feel like the more practical and in-camera an effect is, the better it looks. Even if it's a really silly puppet, it will still look better in camera than most CGI that we can cobble together as hobbyists, if you know what I mean.”
They had four days to shoot it in overall, says Kyle. “Every two weekends. It was a lot of very late nights over those couple weekends, but we managed to make it work.
“We’re now hoping to get it out to as many people as possible, and just show the world our horror comedy, our quirky ways of storytelling, and see what happens and get more into the film business, and hopefully direct more features and more shorts and things.
“We won the Best Monster Film award at the LA Indie Horror Festival last year, on Halloween, and we've just been accepted into two Norwegian festivals – one which is called Ramaskrik, which is up in Oppdal, and one Oslo festival, which is called Ravenheart International Film Festival, so we’re about to have our Scandinavian première.”
No matter how well the filmmaking goes, they plan to continue making music, and feel that the two go together well.
“Music's always going to be important to both of us and play a huge role in the storytelling,” says Kyle. “But I think, yeah, definitely horror, because I've written another one. It's not a sequel to this one, but I've written another short which we're planning to shoot at the end of August, September kind of time. We're just going to do more of it and see where it goes. We're in the groove right now.”
“It's fun to explore the genre,” says Chris. “I don't think Kyle will forever be only a horror director, but for now, there's a lot of fun to be had.”
“Just watch the film,” Kyle says. “Enjoy it. Everybody who does see it does enjoy it, because we put a lot of work into it. We're very proud of our film.”
“If you like it, we're aiming to start shooting our next movie a bit later this year,” says Chris. “Hopefully that will not take too long to get out to the market.”
“The next one is called The Nøkk,” says Kyle. “It's based on Scandinavian folklore monsters. And a guy will encounter one and see what happens.”
