The Town Heroes have taken some notes from the Quentin Tarantino school of filmmaking for the sake of their latest video, “The Walk.” Like the legendary long take scene from Pulp Fiction, The Town Heroes set out to capture their music video in one long, continuous shot. “The Walk” provided the perfect song for the occasion.
The song stands out as one of the highlights on The Town Heroes’ recently released concept album, Home. The song is a fine example of the band really returning to a stripped-down, heavy groove. It’s a moment of rising excitement as one of the album’s main characters—a young man living in a small town in the band’s native Cape Breton—gets drunk for the first time in his life and with it comes the whole cultural impact of such a milestone.
As is the nature of such things, the occasion of such a momentous event in one’s young life is the walk to a dance; pregaming, as the kids say. The young man is getting wrapped up in a sense of invincibility, feeling confident, and entitled to the swagger he’s adopted.
It’s also the very thing Michael S. Ryan and Bruce Gillis would get up to. It’s a rite of passage for most, but for The Town Heroes, it’s literally the right passage. The road they’ve filmed their new video on was, in fact, their own teenage stomping grounds.
“We shot it in the same location where the actual story of the song took place back in 1999. We used to walk to the teen dances along that road, along the old railway tracks,” says Ryan.
The staggered strut Ryan utilizes through the video looks more habitual than rehearsed, and the whole of it comes together magically for something so deceptively challenging despite its simplicity.
“We really wanted to do the one-shot video,” says Ryan. “It’s a big challenge to capture something in one shot, but we wanted to just go for it.”
To get that single shot, the band tapped Patrick Lanctot, who has worked as an editor on big-budget films like American Psycho, Halloween: Resurrection, and Serendipity, although it was Mike’s cousin, James Ryan, who gets credit for the idea and directing.
“[There were] a very lot of 1/10th of one-shots; getting up to a certain point and getting it down to there, then going a little further and a little further,” says Ryan. “So many things could go wrong: traffic, morons stopping to talk… or steal our stuff. Getting the timing of the driving down was tough. Every angle of the camera work had to be specific to make sure Bruce was out of the shot at the right time.”
In the end, it took them six or seven attempted to get the whole thing done in one take and just enough time for someone to attempt to making off with one of the band’s snare drums, assuming they’d been discarded on the side of the road.