Candid Camera: Bifocal Media/Pictures Tell All

Name: Charles

Record Label, Production Company: Bifocal Media and Pictures

BW: Did you and Brad Scott meet in college? What school were you attending and what were you studying?

C: Brad and I met while attending college at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. ECU is known for its art school, its redneck frat population, and its loose men and women. Bifocal Media pretty much put ECU on the map in regards to the art and loose men/women categories. The frat boys did the rest. Brad studied film and production. I studied media production and graphic design.

BW: Was the Actuality of Thought video a school project?

C: Nope. We just wanted to make an artsy video with all the band footage I had compiled from many of the shows I had set up in town.

BW: Was the name Bifocal derived from your dual focus on video and music?

C: That's what we like to tell people and I guess it fits now. When we made the Actuality of Thought video we never expected to become a record label. We chose the name Bifocal Media because there was two of us. It wasn't until we saw the Ladderback play that we decided to put out records.

BW: How did Bifocal evolve into a record label? How separate are the label and Bifocal Films?

C: We started out with 100 copies of the actuality of though video. We thought that might be all we would ever manufacture. Lumberjack Distribution decided to send us some money to have more made so we made another 300 of them. They sold them all pretty quickly. At this point we didn't even have a bank account for Bifocal. We were keeping the money in my underwear drawer wrapped in a stinky pair of white briefs for safe keeping. When checks first started coming in, we didn't know what to do with the money. We saw the Ladderback play and decided that we should give all our money to any band that can destroy us. This is how we became a record label and this is the way it still works today.

Bifocal Pictures is a service company that we run to pay the bills. After we put out a few videos, service jobs started coming in for rock video work and such. Now we're doing lots of DVD work and video work for enhanced CDs. All the money from the service work goes into Bifocal Media and we still end up giving all our money to bands while we live on credit cards and good looks. Brad lives in L.A now so you can bet your ass that he's a looker. Look for him in the Diesel jeans ad.No shit. he's all painted up, running around naked in the desert.

BW: How did you come to work with the bands whose music you've distributed?

C: Many of the bands we've put out records for were in the early Bifocal Media videos. We saw them play and they blew us....away. Needless to say, we really have to be moved by the band's performance to pour so much time and money into getting their music out to the world. We also have to get along with them and run them through a secret induction trial involving our other company "Trisexual Flms". Let's just say that there’s some rather incriminating Serotonin and Ladderback erotica out there in underground video stores. Just wait until you see what we made the Party of Helicopters go through.

BW: Have you ever signed a band based on a demo, or have you always been able to associate the visual experience of seeing a band live to your decision whether or not to work with them?

C: We didn't hear from Serotonin for two years after the Actuality of Thought video came out. Then I get three songs from the Universal Time Constant full-length in the mail with a "Will you put out our record" letter. We put the record out because it was amazing and we knew they were an amazing live band.

BW: How important is a band's live performance to your personal experience with music?

C: The live thing is 70 percent of it.

BW: Do you think that MTV had much to do with creating a strong association between the video and music mediums?

C: Oh yeah as far as the whole rock video thing goes….they were pretty revolutionary in bringing that whole form of film to the public eye. It's hard to remember what it was like before MTV had such an influence on the popular music industry. In the case of punk rock or whatever....it's kind of sad that many kids today will never be able to experience the music without seeing it with the commercial, watered down skew that MTV has put on it. They take the most watered down, accessible elements of the music and culture, they then spit it back at the public and market it as "punk" or "alternative.” It was nice when you had to dig to find bands doing interesting things and when you found them it felt really special. In most cases, the music was really good, challenging, and inspiring. Now "punk" bands are a dime a dozen and....ahhhhhhhhh! I'm starting to sound like a punk rock cliché here. There's still loads of good bands playing music.

BW: Do you think the emergence of MTV2 and MuchMusic made it easier or more difficult for independent videographers, musicians, artists to have a mainstream voice?

C: Oh God yes. There's no way we would be making rock videos if labels didn't have hopes of getting them on those stations.

BW: Do you still have to film weddings to subsidize your projects at Bifocal?

C: At this point, I would rather eat [Editor's note: Something really, really awful.and not delicious] than film a wedding.

BW: Has any band ever been hesitant about being captured on one of your films?

C: When we were shooting for the Michigan Fest DVD, Silkworm and Liars didn't want to be filmed. It's a shame because I love Liars. It did however save us about 10 tapes and two weeks work so....cool beans.

BW: What bands have been the easiest or most fun to work with?

C: Braid was and is a delightful group of people we loved working with them and we just recently started working with them again on the Killing a Camera DVD. We are also putting out a full-length for Chris Broach's band the Firebird Band later this year. Damon gives the meanest massage I have ever experienced in all my life.

BW: How did your relationship with ESPN2 come about?

C: We started Bifocal Media in Greenville, N.C. I was a competitive BMX rider from the time I was 11 up until about two years ago. In the early 90s up until around 1996, Freestyle BMX was pretty underground. My friends and I rode non-stop. I made a couple BMX videos featuring myself and my friends who rode. There was a contest series called the "Bicycle Stunt Series" put on by Mat Hoffman who ran an independent bicycle company called Hoffman bikes. In 1995 (I think that was the year), Mat sold his tiny little contest series to ESPN and they renamed it the X games. Freestyle BMX got huge and lot's of the guys winning these nationally televised contests were my friends. I had my foot in the door as a BMX videographer and my friends took me along for the ride when they got famous. Some of my early little BMX videos featured Dave Mirra, Leigh Ramsdell, Mat Hoffman....lot's of my friends got really famous over the last few years. The last bit of work I did for ESPN was the Dave Mirra Super BMX Tour. Fun times and free shoes.

BW: How important has finding a reliable distributor been to your success?

C: Well, we're very strongly considering an exclusive deal through one of our current distributors so our releases will get a bit more attention on the sales side. We now have about 15 distributors and while they all do a good job, they are all a bit too dedicated to their exclusive labels to give us 100 percent. We'll put out a record that gets 80 outstanding reviews and charts on hundreds of college radio stations, yet I'll still get 10 e mails a week from kids who can't find it. It's frustrating. The Ladderback just played eight sold-out shows in Japan. There's no reason why those kids should have a hard time finding their records. I'm hoping that the exclusive thing will solve these kinds of problems.

BW: How has Bifocal grown since 1997? Are there more players involved than just you and Brad?

C: I've quite working other jobs. We have lots of new releases coming out. We eventually got the Bifocal account out of my underwear and into the bank. My good friend Jay Holmes was working with us for a while, but now he's moving to Japan in April to marry a woman he met face to face for the first time when we went over for the Ladderback tour in November. We're pretty excited for him. Brad moved out to the west coast in 1999 and continues to make rock videos.

BW: What projects are you currently working on?

C: Bifocal Media releases for 2003 include the Braid Killing A Camera DVD, The Kickass Death Metal Is For Pussies CD, The Party of Helicopters Please Believe It LP, a Des Ark CD, a new Serotonin CD, a Utah! CD, a Goner CD, a Firebird Band CD, a new Crash Smash Explode CD and some other goodies. Bifocal Pictures is currently working on a DVD for Initial Records on the 2002 Krazy Fest. We're putting together a DVD for Lovitt records and we're editing the Superchunk DVD for Merge a little later this year.

BW: Many of your video releases have also highlighted independent filmmakers and films. Who are your favorite filmmakers, independent or otherwise and why?

C: I like the work of Spike Jones as I can relate to where he's coming from. Even his work on skate videos and his photography for early BMX magazines like Freestylin and Homeboy were pretty innovative at the time. The same can be said for his major motion pictures. Jean-Pierre Jennet captures to most visually stunning images I have ever seen in films like City of Lost Children and Delicatessen. A like the way Wes Anderson captures weird, quirky, awkwardness....man I could go on and on with this one.

BW: My wife really liked the transition graphics in the Michigan Fest DVD and thought they must've taken hours to come up with. How long did the Michigan Fest DVD take you to compile and put together?

C: We spent about 10 months on the Michigan Fest film. Some of those paper ball transitions took days to pull off as they are actual stop animations done with paper. We spent way longer on that flick than we could actually afford to considering we funded everything and it was our only work for about nine of the 10 months it was in production. In the end I'm happy with it though and so are the bands.

BW: Were the band interviews you conducted for Michigan Fest and important part of being able to tell the story of the Fest? Is this a method that will be echoed in the Krazyfest and Lovitt DVD projects?

C: We thought it was really important to get a bit of personality out of all the bands to go along with the performance. I didn't want it to come off as some sort of disposable archive of live performances. We wanted to capture the weekend as we experienced it. Both the Krazy Fest and Lovitt DVDs will have interviews too. Especially the Lovitt DVD. That's about 50/50 interviews and live rock.

BW: What is the most bizarre image you've captured on film?

C: Ladderback tour 2001. New Orleans. Me running down the hall of our hotel wet and naked with a road map coming out of my arse

BW: Have you ever rejected a music or video project? Why? How did that rejection letter or phone call start?

C: We get lots of demos and reject most of them. Just the other day I rejected an offer to make a gymnastics film for little girls over the phone. It sounded like it would be just as much fun as filming a wedding. We get lots of offers to do fun work that the potential clients can't afford to pay for. When they hear the price it's like a rejection....I guess....or.....this is a long interview man....sorry.