Q&A: Spencer Ford

Nov 2022

So how was this video made?

Believe it or not the idea for this video actually started as a scrappy money saving idea. I thought we could just use the cloud car (from Jawny's previous videos) and hire a drone pilot to follow a real street race driver then just let them loose. Obviously this would've been extremely unsafe, not to mention illegal, so we opted to figure out how to do it legitimately (I was probably the only team member who ever realistically considered my initial approach.)

The goal was always to do it in one shot with the artist in a real car doing real stunts. It was surprisingly easy to shut down a bunch of streets in Downtown L.A. but that may have just been because we had a great producer, Kevin Clark (@kevinclark) at Screens Production Company.

It was the most pre-production heavy project that I've been a part of. I generally like to leave a lot of time on the day to improvise and tend to slack on pre production but that wasn't really an option for this video.

We had to make maps, storyboards, stunt-action-point presentations, video drive throughs, physical walk throughs, etc. I've attached some of those documents. The biggest thing was just finding people who were talented enough to pull something like this off. We got really lucky and were able to work with the best of the best. Jay Christensen (@jaybyrdfilms) piloted the drone and despite being prepared to go through multiple drones that day Jay was so on it that we only needed one. Sammy Maloof (@sammymaloof) drove the car. Sammy has driven for movies including 2 Fast 2 Furious, Tokyo Drift, and Transporter 2, so needless to say we were pretty excited to have him on board.

He brought his family with him who double as his stunt team/pit crew and casually offered to do donuts around his daughters. That's in the video. We technically had 10 streets shutdown but halfway through the day an event started near the border of our run so we moved it up a block. I'm not sure what the exact number is on the budget because we shot this video the same day as "Wide Eyed" another music video by Jawny so the budgets were combined but I'm pretty sure Adios was somewhere around 60k-70k. I've been making videos my whole life, it's how me and my siblings would play as kids. I plan on making videos my whole life, ideally I'd like to move to narrative features at some point and have written a couple but am still working on growing as a director/writer. I actually think most of my talent lies in editing and I initially started directing just so I would have things to edit. At the moment I am working on finishing up the rollout for Jawny's album as his creative director, working on a bunch of videos for Vanillaroma, working on music videos for other artists and editing lots of random stuff.

Spencer Ford's website is spencerford.org.