"Feather Woman", by Voodoo Pharmacology

A look back at our first collaboration

In our brief absence from our publication, due to Heather’s surgery as some of you know about, we did some reflecting on previous work that we wanted to share. What follows will be a somewhat meandering account of a meandering music video, traveling throughout the four seasons and layers of symbolism. Take a moment to watch “Feather Woman”, a music video we created for the band Voodoo Pharmacology (contains nude content):

Voodoo Pharmacology was and is a curious band, fusing Americana Folk with psychedelic and electronica and everything in between. Its founding members were participants of the underground Baltimore arts scene around the same time that Heather Joi was active in her enigmatic, visionary performance art. So, somewhere around 2015, singer-songwriter James asked her if she would dream up a music video for one of their new singles.

This was how she and I began working together on Feather Woman.

Or, that was mostly how, anyway. It was right around the time Heather and I started seeing each other that James had inquired about the project. Naturally, being the workaholic Capricorn that she is, she figured working with me on it would be the perfect bonding experience. And I—being the Capricorn that I am—did not disagree. It certainly helped that I was a film guy.

When I first heard it, the song Feather Woman hit me with all the depth of character one looks for in great folk music. It went on a journey, and aired love and loss with subtlety and mild temperament.

Developing the Idea

Because Heather's experience was in live stage performance, and not in film per se, she turned to me to see what the very first step should be. I basically said, "Well, we need a shot-list. Or at least, a scene list, and I can develop a shot-list from that."

Heather set about right away to develop that list for the video, seeking to represent its lyrics with sincerity. Her process initially was: listen to the song over and over. And I do mean... over and over and over. All of the time that we spent together during that phase, she had the song on repeat. It seemed crazy to me at the time, but she is very much a practitioner of creative visualization. This put her into a constant mental state of existing within the song—even becoming the song—for a while.

Then she finally sent me a scene list. What I saw in her treatment was a seemingly random array of images strung together. In all honesty, my first reaction was, "What the heck is all this?" (Admittedly, I've gone through a modicum of evolution in my views on art since then).

My main questions to her were, "How do these tie together?" and, "What's the story here?" Digging a grave, homages to Voodoo Barons, gender-swapped Pieta, Daphne, tarot cards, pretend hangings... yes, at face value it seemed random.

We had a lot of back and forth about it, and the exact details of how we reached a compromise on the final shot-list escape me. The best I can say is that I was all, "Wtf am I supposed to do with this?" and she was all, "It's muh visionary art process!" I seem to recall even getting her brother from out of state to chime in and say, "Yeah, I can't really tell what's going on here."

Eventually she won me over with, "You'll see, you'll see; just trust me, you'll see." The band had signed her on as the director after all, while I was the DP; so, it was her call. And I would see. But, that would only come after doing a long series of shoots that were not only challenging in their own right, but the woman in charge was a total film production noob.

A Cheek Between Two Thorns

Heather talks a lot about "authenticity". So do I. That's great. That's for good reason. That's important for art.

Where authenticity is not as important—and I have taken every opportunity in the years since then to remind her—is: if you're going to film a man sitting completely naked, on the dirt, in the middle of a ring of fire, that's going to be uncomfortable enough. Therefore, YOU DO NOT NEED TO ALSO MAKE THE FIRE OUT OF ROSE BUSH CLIPPINGS. Especially when you're filming in the dark, and the clippings scatter everywhere—including, but not limited to, where the naked man is sitting! And these weren't just large rose branches with large thorns that one could easily avoid, no. There were hundreds of thin, tiny twigs, with their tiny splintering barbs, strewn about to blend in with the dirt.

I was pulling them out of my skin for days (possible exaggeration). To her credit, she had certainly made it easy for me to act... tormented.

So, while much of this memoir points to things Heather taught me about the conceptual side of art, this was one thing I taught her: on film, what you see is what you get. Not everything needs to be absolutely authentic. Sometimes you can use a gold-painted object to look like solid gold. And sometimes... you can build a fire with something other than rose bushes.

She laughs that I’m still not over this incident, but that’s a credit to its authenticity. Fortunately we’ve had opportunity to balance the scales since then, particularly with the scene in our “So Alive” video where she rose out of the water. That water—was freezing. But she managed it.

Ongoing Production

Despite her not sitting in any rings of fire during this production, Heather did show a lot of bravery in Feather Woman. Like I said, she had no film production experience. We had to very quickly show her the ropes of the film-making workflow, and she had to apply her learning almost immediately to scenes that involved tons of people, public locations, and the logistics of filming at a restaurant.

The baptism scene had the most people and crew involved. It was an ensemble shot, with the entire band plus background actors, and we had two cameras running. Our other camera guy Steve did great, but the second camera was on Heather to operate—while directing. And she barely knew how to use a camera at the time. And not only was I in the scene, but... I was in the middle of a river. I couldn't exactly run over to answer any questions, if there was trouble.

These are just some of the kinds of antics you can expect, if you ever want to shoot a film with virtually no budget. Jk; it’s in every film, budget or no. Nevertheless, we were stunned with how the baptism scene came out.

The entire production took almost two years to film. This was on account of my living part-time out of state at the time, the sheer amount of scenes we had in the project, and the fact that the plan involved scenes occurring in every season. It was one of the most intense searching and juggling acts I’ve ever been a part of.

This was made all the more interesting in that Heather was rehabilitating a juvenile crow through the experience. Around the time that the band approached Heather to make this video, she found the crow near the home of one of her gardening clients. Tyrfing, which we named her during our time caring for her, had been suffering from an ingrown tail feather, preventing her from taking flight as soon as she was naturally supposed to. Thus, having a crow traveling on Heather’s shoulder everywhere she went added a titular serendipity to the project.

Tyrfing was rather low maintenance, as animals go. She needed a place to perch, water, and crow kibble stuffed down her gullet every half hour (literally), which was all easy to do from Heather’s shoulder. The bird droppings were easily managed by keeping a rag under her, and we spent so much time outside in the woods that it hardly mattered. So she accompanied us on quite a few of our shoots.

Layers of Meaning

Heather and I both like to toy with symbolism in our work. While I will talk about it ceaselessly, as it satisfies my ego’s base need to appear clever, I also prefer not to take away the interpretive quality of the art from our audience.

So, to the question, “What does this film mean?”, we would first simply refer to the lyrics. We crafted a series of images that give windows into ways of seeing each line.

We could also refer to intentions:

Heather spent many years as a figure model for fine artists, at places like the Schuler School of Fine Arts, and MICA. This practice ingrained in her a sense of looking at the human figure objectively, and she wanted to take that into this video.

Because of the band’s name involving “voodoo”, she wanted to pay some homage to the Voodoo Barons—as safely as possible.

Regarding tarot imagery: the Five of Cups makes an appearance, which represents pining over lost opportunities while new opportunities pass you by.

...And the rest you may be able to figure out for yourself, tying the piece together into a lovely phantasmagoria of unrequited love.

Some may also notice, we revisited two themes in So Alive that were also in Feather Woman: dangling from a tree, and vintage film. Sometimes things just stick in your mind.

The big lesson I think I learned from this process was: juxtaposition. Yes, I'm using the most tiresome, pretentious word that ever appeared in the arts, but hear me out. Juxtaposition: "putting two things together," essentially. Through the combination of two disparate ideas, a third thing will emerge: meaning. The more contrast between the two things, the more curious the task of interpreting meaning from the work. You do not need to slap the audience in the face with the meaning; that's insulting. Meaning is an epiphenomenon of the elements within the work. Heather, by spending so much time sitting with the song, allowed it to get into her subconscious far enough where the line between projection and reception are blurred. The result was something sublime, and genuine to both herself and the artistic musicians who wrote the song. She allowed the music to dictate the images to her.

Thank you for joining us! We have more projects coming along, so subscribe for future updates.