With Silverchair’s "Freak" (which earned MTV Australia’s Best International Video Award), Casale incorporated various hues and compositional tactics that were inspired by horror films. The band members are seen playing ferociously inside a tangerine-tinted room lined with heat lamps. As the temperature is cranked up, a scientist in a radiation suit swabs each of them with cotton to get a sweat sample, which he places in a petri dish. In a sea-green laboratory, a disfigured woman is injected with the group’s secretions and reverts to normal human form. Later, after ingesting a beaker’s worth of Silverchair perspiration, she transforms into a humanoid extraterrestrial. Says Casale, "The video is designed to look like a cheesy horror film, so we shot it on 16mm, using Kodak’s Vision 200T [7274] at 30 frames per second and limiting the color palette to greens and oranges. We used the telecine to pump those colors up and drain the others from the spectrum."
A frequent motif in Casale’s visual work both with and without Devo is supersaturated colored backgrounds (often provided by walls or cycloramas). The director generally prefers to manipulate palettes in postproduction rather than subjecting sets to specific gel shadings; he finds that tinkering in telecine leaves him with more control over colors. He also is known to limit color schemes via art direction. While shooting a low-budget video for the industrial-techno band Fat, however, Casale employed both telecine and gel manipulation. The clip was shot in one 18-hour day at the bottom of an old barge parked at Pier 36 of New York City’s Chelsea Wharf. "It was such a scary environment," he recalls. "The barge was dredged up from the bottom of the water and made into a ’lounge,’ but down in the bowels of the thing, it looked like it did 50 years ago: it still had all of these dials, pipes, conduits, controls and low ceilings, but everything was covered with rust. We lit the space with all sorts of sodium vapor-type gels so that it would feel like a parking lot at night. Then we hung up some Lightning Strikes units, covered them with green [gels] and made them malfunction and flicker. In telecine, we took out all of the other colors and crushed the blacks heavily to create an almost duotone look."
The director’s cinematic influences came forth in Soundgarden’s "Blow Up the Outside World," which he describes as "A Clockwork Orange meets The Parallax View." Suffused in a nauseating pea-green hue, the spot presents lead singer Chris Cornell fastened to a metallic chair and covered with electrodes. Two scientists monitor his reactions as a giant screen serves up a procession of disturbing images: Adolf Hitler greeting a child, a woman shooting up heroin, a huge crucifix set ablaze. Comments Casale, "I like the kinds of static wide-angle shots and slow pans that Stanley Kubrick uses, which allow you to study the world in a cold and analytical way. There was a lot of politically incorrect imagery [on the video’s ’torture screen’], but the purpose of it was to illustrate the disturbing aspects of a world that is upside-down; the world we live in is so full of hate, violence, stupidity and inhumanity that [the character played by Cornell] wants to blow up the outside world. But at the same time, he is being conditioned to accept the images that all of us are constantly fed by the media.
"I have an obsession with that bilious, sick green color," continues Casale. "To me, it represents industrial sludge or danger there’s something unholy about it. When you see those colors, you think of antifreeze running out of a car in other words, the [Soundgarden video’s milieu] does not reflect a positive world."
No stranger to having novel ideas rejected, Casale encountered stiff resistance to the TV look he designed for "Self-Destructive," a never-aired spot which the director and Anghel Decca shot for the rock ’n’ roll group Ridel High. The clip presents the fictional television program of the clip’s title, which plays out on a garishly designed set whose indigo, powder blue, bright orange and yellow hues recall the trappings of real game shows such as The Joker’s Wild or Tic Tac Dough. The game’s contestants (played by the three bandmates) must prevent audience members from being subjected to life-or-death situations: a naked, middle-aged man sits above a shark tank; an old woman engages in combat with a nunchaku-wielding karate master; a bubbly blonde sits blindfolded beneath a boulder suspended on a rope as a circus clown cuts the cord. Casale notes, "’Self-Destructive’ was shot with a three-camera Beta package, just like an actual TV game show. There are certain angles that you don’t see on these shows because of the limitations of a three-camera shoot, and they never edit those programs with rapid-fire one-second edits. The whole concept was that it was truly a ’music video.’ When we showed the clip to MTV, they said, ’This looks like a game show.’ Well, no kidding. Most of MTV’s programming today is made up of game shows they actually play very few music videos so we designed our clip to look like a game show. That’s the joke. MTV is supposed to be hip and cutting-edge, but that particular video didn’t fly with them.
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