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To start out, who are you, names and duties. Gotta remember, there’s no ‘I’ in ‘Collective.’ Except in that last syllable, fuck, forgot about that.
ADAM: We are Adam Toht, Justin Francis, Jake Guttormsson, Jesse Roff, Brent Chesenek, and Ben Toht. We do everything and change roles all the time. Justin and I are usually on set (budget and time—we are usually working on post before the shoot even happens), but everyone is very powerful and brilliant and impressive in what they do all the time. We don’t list a bunch of credits for each person because this is a collaborative effort and ego-madness is all we need... but we come up with the concepts, write the treatments, cast, pre-produce, direct, shoot, shoot location stills, edit, build virtual sets, animate, colorize, make things amazing, etc. The same six people all the way through with some help from our other loved collaborators (Scott Edelstein, RFM, Alex Pacion, all our co-cinematographers, crew, Stavros, HSI...)
JUSTIN: For simplicity’s sake I’ll call myself a co-director, though there’s a lot of grey area when we talk about credit in the Saline Project. The fact is, we all do everything. We pride ourselves in doing every part of the process–from concept, through production, all the way through the online. For example, on one job I might work on the treatment, pre-produce, co-direct, light, operate the camera, shoot location stills, edit the rough cut, and composite in After Effects. While Adam and I have co-directed all our videos up to this point, every other guy in the collective might do just as many jobs as the both of us. It is truly a team effort.
When did you guys get out of school?
JAKE: I graduated from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1996. I majored in printmaking.
JESSE: I attended 2 community colleges at my leisure, and did not graduate—my experimenting with college ended around 1990.
JUSTIN: December.
BRENT: I got out of college in May 2003. I graduated.
BEN: ‘03. I just started working here six months ago. I’m already in charge of watering the two office plants (unofficially).
ADAM: I dropped out just before Jake graduated (I was supposed to graduate with Jake but was young and foolish). I majored in painting but did whatever I wanted to and am reasonably glad I did. A few years ago, like spring of ‘03, I saw the ‘Towers’ piece. Then a few show packages, then it seemed like BANG, you went right to music videos. How’d that happen?
ADAM: We loved doing opens (actually, we just finished doing our first show package in a while so that “loved” should be “love”), title sequences, etc., but in 2003, were dying to do something longer form and more open and creative. Often when we’d do show opens we’d try to tell a story and create a cool world and then we’d often get notes back like, “Can you make this more of a montage?”, or, “Can’t you just cut a bunch of footage together and throw some graphics over it?”. These approaches are totally effective and fine, but one can get a little restless after doing that thirteen times. So, we did some spec spots for MTV’s “Mpeg Us” campaign, which exploded and became the flagship spots for the campaign and our reel ended up over at H.S.I. Productions. Scott Edelstein, an executive producer at H.S.I., loved the reel and called us in for a meeting. Universal Records ended up taking a chance on us and we shot our first video for Blue October a few months later. It’s been pretty much non-stop since then (actually, it’s been pretty much non stop since we started). But, oddly enough, we won an Emmy for the “Mortal Enemies” title sequence soon after turning our focus to music videos. We got tons of calls to do opens and title sequences but turned everything down. We’ve had a ton of opportunities to expand and do tons of jobs and make piles of cash, but it’s always seemed like our strength has been in focus and in having a core group of artists and filmmakers intimately working together and creating consistent work. With it being the same crew, I think our creative growth has been steady and natural, and so far the work has fallen into place in whatever realm we’re focusing on.
JAKE: It doesn’t feel like BANG to me. I think a steady progression of good work lead us on to bigger and better things. It was a mixture of a lot of hard work and a lot of luck.
JESSE: Obsessively working all the time.
JUSTIN: Adam, Jesse & Jake are solely responsible for the Towers piece. I didn’t work on that project. I was working on other live action projects at the time, and Adam and I decided to combine our reels. I received a call from an HSI intern in March of 2003, looking for a DP for some spec projects. But rather than sending my own DP reel, I sent in our collective Saline Project reel. The people at HSI were blown away at the amount of projects we had between us–SP had already won an Emmy at that point! So from there we took meetings with the suits and then landed a music video on our first try.
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