Casale considers the most successful Devo video to be the clip for the gold-selling single "It’s A Beautiful World." Completed for a mere $17,000, this video consists of iconic imagery from the Twenties through the Sixties: World War I skirmishes; atomic explosions; beauty contests; hula dancers; retro-futuristic Fifties cars; Civil Rights-era race riots; emaciated, starving children; and peaceful love-ins. The juxtapositioning of these shots serves to illustrate how the double-edged sword of technology can produce a brave new world of both convenience and catastrophe. Casale and Statler spent hundreds of hours scouring archival houses on both coasts for suitable scenes, which he and editor Dale Cooper later blended with black-and-white performance footage of the band. The director says, "It’s one of those videos, along with ’Whip It,’ which stands the test of time, and [the lyrics represent] one man’s opinion: ’It’s a beautiful world for you, but not for me’ and it’s so clear why. [The imagery] gives you the hope and silliness of human nature, but also the horror of the bad things that people do, and the fact that we could be different. It isn’t just menial and silly or cynical and negative; it’s more about yin and yang both the light and dark sides of life are shown. The switcheroo that it pulls on people still works to this day.
"Today, considering the cost involved in getting the rights to archival footage, you couldn’t make a video like that for less than $250,000. All of the independent archival film houses have pretty much been gobbled up by [large corporations]. And in a culture obsessed with TV-land and retro periods, everybody now knows what those pieces of film are worth; they didn’t back then. The thought was more, ’This is junk, but we can make some money on it.’"
As far back as 1982, Devo had the foresight to incorporate bluescreen effects, computer-generated imagery and rearscreen projection into their live and video performances [as seen in the clips "Time Out For Fun," "Peek-a-Boo" and "That’s Good"]. Casale notes that the band used the various techniques to "break all of the boundaries between the stage show, the record and video." While recording Oh No, It’s Devo, for example, the group based every track around a rhythmic sequence integral to its composition. As a track was mixed onto a master tape, the same sequence with a click-track would be simultaneously laid onto another machine thus allowing the musicians to sync up the song to a signal on another track hooked up to a video apparatus.
In detailing the benefits of this approach, Casale explains, "We could then marry background plates [of silhouetted symbols and geometric grids produced on a Kray computer] to the complete mixed song, edit them, and then project them during concerts, in sync with the sequencer sounds stripped off from the album mix. We would play live in front of a 25’ by 30’ screen positioned 10 feet behind us. In sync with the specific images on the screen were the background images that had been shown on MTV in the video for the very same song. What you saw live was the exact same thing seen in the video, down to the same sequencer line. If there had been video CDs back then, you could have listened to the record and looked at the screen at any point to see a live performance mixed with narrative video imagery all cut in sync to the beat.
"It was experimental and cumbersome," he concedes. "We actually lugged around a six-track dubber and a 35mm projector rig connected with gear teeth to the dubber which had the sequencer lines and click-tracks on it. The sound would come through our stage monitor system; we could hear it and play to the click-track and sequencer lines. The audience heard a perfect mix. But the whole system was costing us tons of money, and we never knew on any given night if it was going to work. Sometimes we lost the images as we started playing."
Though his more than 20-year association with Devo has earned Casale a reputation as an avant-garde artiste, he maintains that his creative process and working methods are fairly straightforward. He explains, "The visual language of where the camera is, what it represents, how it moves and how often I should edit all proceeds from the particular idea or concept being filmed. I rarely end up using the same equipment or film stock twice, but I work a lot with the same directors of photography [Anghel Decca and Welles Hackett] because they bring so much to the table and share the same work ethic as I do."
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