The Duluth Homegrown Music Festival has been around for twenty years, and the Homegrown Music Video Fest has been part of it for ten. Videomakers are assigned a band / song randomly, and they have a few weeks to make something. The rest is pretty wide open, and the resulting videos are screened during the weeklong Homegrown Music Festival. I’ve made a video of some sort almost every year, I think I only missed a couple. Here are some of my favorites, along with some behind the scenes. They may be a little rough around the edges, but these are where I experiment, try out techniques, try to help out local bands, and have lots of fun. We did a retrospective of the fest with links to all the past years at Perfect Duluth Day.
The Keep Aways – “Over Your Shoulder”
The Dames – “Head of State”
The Dames reunited in 2017 after a 15 year break. This song was from recordings done 19 years earlier, but this song was a perfect fit for 2017. It made it to City Pages’ Best Videos of 2017 list.
500 Millions Society – “The Quest”
The plan for this video was to make it look and feel like a 60s/70s variety show a la Tom Jones or Sonny and Cher, shot on a soundstage somewhere in Los Angeles. But we aren’t in California, and all we had was a small space above a downtown Duluth restaurant. So each member was shot individually, then assembled into a full band.
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Starling of Athens
Black-Eyed Snakes – “Rise Up!”
This was for the first Homegrown Music Videos Fest, and for some sadistic reason, we only had a weekend to do the videos the first year. As hastily as this was to put together, it probably ended up going farther than any others, getting shown in several film festivals, and at the Walker Art Center. Mayor Don Ness also asked if he could use his caricature from the video as his profile pic on Facebook and other places online.
