If you want to map out my creative evolution over the last dozen years or so, looking at the music videos I’ve made with Scott Cooper is a pretty good place to start. It’s a timeline that goes from freezing our asses off in a local stream to descending into public domain madness during a global lockdown. But the goal was always the same: find the emotional core of Scott’s songwriting and build an atmospheric world around it.
Here’s a look back at how we got from point A to point Z.
2011 & 2012: The Cabin Sessions
We kicked things off in 2011 with Truth is a Change. We shot it at Gus’ Cabin Studio just outside town, and the space was inherently textured and moody. We just let the environment do the heavy lifting.
We actually shot so much that day that we banked a second video, Huntsville, which we ended up sitting on for a year. That one involved trudging right out into the rushing water of the nearby stream. It was pure, chaotic, run-and-gun shooting where you just embrace the elements, pray the camera doesn’t take a bath, and trust you can fix any lighting chaos in post.
2014: The Cinematic Crossover
In 2014, my two worlds collided. I was deep into making my indie feature Start Local, and Scott wrote Wake Up specifically for the film. Building a music video that served as an extension of the movie’s universe was a massive undertaking, but it gave the song this grounded, narrative weight. It anchored his music to the visual world we had spent months building.
2018: Chasing the Vibe
By 2018, we stripped things back down. We hit a local beach to shoot Something Else. No massive narrative setups, just trying to capture the expansive, emotive quality of the track against the shifting light of the shoreline. It’s all about chasing that nostalgic, atmospheric feeling that makes you want to stare out a rainy window for an hour.
2020: The Lockdown Edits
Then 2020 happened, the world broke, and we had to pivot entirely to the editing bay.
I took his track The Killing Kind and smashed it together with the 1932 public domain movie White Zombie. Recontextualizing Bela Lugosi’s eerie, vintage dread to fit the rhythm of Scott’s song was an incredibly satisfying, slightly unhinged editorial exercise. It’s amazing what you can do when you sync rhythm with an old, cursed-looking piece of film.
That same year, the pandemic forced us into total remote mode for North of 10, featuring Caroline Brooks of the Good Lovelies. Since nobody could legally be in the same room, Scott sent me a hard drive full of home-shot, happy family footage at the cottage. My job was to stitch together a sense of warmth and human connection while we were all trapped in our houses staring at the walls.
It’s a solid reminder that, at the end of the day, if you have good music and raw emotion, you can always build something meaningful in the edit.
