Party Favor
Courtesy Photo
In the beginning of the “Bust Em” clip, a robot comes to life and punches a scientist’s head right off his body. That sets the tone for the rest of the video: the mechanical man faces off against a series of opponents, including a dinosaur, while the track revs furiously in the background. It’s a playful, cartoonish visual — in the end, it turns out that each character represents an action figure, and the battles are being staged by two imaginative young children.
In an email to Billboard Dance, Party Favor (Dylan Ragland) explained his intent with the video, which features cameos from Ghastly, Carter Cruise, 4B, Boombox Cartel, Paz, Two Fresh and Brillz. The track is now available for purchase via Mad Decent.
Watch the clip below, and read a short Q&A about the visual.
How do you generally approach translating songs to video?
This is technically my second music video so I haven’t fully developed the perfect plan. I like to treat them how I treat making my songs — which is pretty much me winging it until someone that knows what their doing steps in and says, “nope, can’t do it like that. Gotta be this way or that way.”
For “Bust Em,” as soon as I finished the song, I wanted a video. I felt like the song itself has so much energy that a music video just felt so natural. The characters and wackiness of this video really are owed to the director, Alex Westmore, who took the majority of the creative control and just ran with ideas.
Do you find any other artists’ videos particularly inspiring or effective?
I think music videos are such an important visual medium because they give you something to latch onto. I think oftentimes when people listen to music they get this visual in their head or a story in their head, and music videos allow you to see it in a completely new way. Some of my favorite videos are from Michael Jackson and from OK Go. Creatively they have made the music video its own animal.
How did you connect with the director?
I actually went to college with him and we have been friends ever since. We wanted to work on something together for this project for so long, and as soon as the song was done, I was dead set on having him as my director. I knew he had the right mindset on how to approach it.
Where did the idea for this clip come from?
Alex has this wonderfully funny brain. We were going in this other direction originally — it had more of an eighties workout vibe to it — and he came up with the idea kind of out of the blue, and immediately I said, “I love this.” How do we translate the imagination of two kids playing with toys? The goal was also to make something below B Movie status. Maybe C movie? That is now a thing.
Did you play with a lot of action figures when you were younger?
I think like any kid I did, but I definitely wasn’t a collector or obsessed. But I think what’s cool about action figures — everyone can kind of relate to when toys were a huge part of life. For girls it might’ve been Barbies, but that was a time of complete imagination.