Tron Cole: DIY video retrospective

Bio

Tron Cole is an elusive video director who lives in New York City. Heavily influenced by the 70’s & 80’s “No Wave Cinema” movement (in both style and attitude) he cites Lech Kowalskis’ “Gringo, Story of a Junkie” and Malcolm McLaren’s “The Great Rock & Roll Swindle” as his two favorite instances of combining film & music.

From the desk of Tron Cole:

You can’t fake the funk.

I really dislike when I can tell an artist paid a lot to make something look lo-fi as an aesthetic choice… so I try to keep my video making process as purely-janky as possible.

Believe it or not (and you’ll probably believe it) all these videos cost less than $100 to make in total.

The only payment I require as a director is a constant supply of Winston Light Cigarettes, Black Deli Coffee, and Adderall (the blue kind)….

The camera only holds battery life for 10 minutes at a time? Perfect. The screen is cracked on the zoom-finder and you’re filming blind? Even better. Only half the keys on your computer work? Great.

That’s where the good stuff comes from.

I find good art emerges from limitations and working around them…. if you have all the colors to paint with, it’s hard to decide where to start.

I never purchase real editing software. I do the monthly or weekly free trials because it sets a time limit on when I must finish – otherwise the project disappears into the ether. It makes editing feel like a race and doesn’t allow you to overthink things.

SELECT WORKS:

The VIrgins Flashbacks , Memories

All of this was shot in the band’s living room. The camera was fucked up and couldn’t actually record to tape, so it had to be plugged into the desktop computer at all times to capture the footage. This also meant I couldn’t move the camera at all. We used a green sheet of paper as green-screen and as many lamps as we could find from around the apartment. All the background footage was taken from hours of digging through old public domain archives with Donald (singer for The Virgins).

Once the video was done and ready to go out, I saw Jesse Camp (the legendary 90’s MTV VJ) on St. Marks place just hanging out. I went up to him (had never met him before) and asked if he would be down to introduce this music video I was making like he used to do for videos on MTV. Being the nicest dude in the world he said yes, and we filmed it the next day. He’s a legend.

The Virgins – Impressions of You

This video was filmed at 5 am in the east village over the course of 2 days. Donald from The Virgins and I would wake up early and walk around as the sun was rising and just roam / shoot footage. That’s my favorite time in Manhattan… when the streets are empty and it’s got this strange light, eerie feeling. It’s also the only time of the day that you can watch Seagulls flying over the East Village.

The deli footage was all done on a whim. There was this cool teenager working the night shift at the deli below the The Virgins apartment, and we asked him to be in it. We blasted the music, handed him a guitar, and then just filmed and drank beers for an hour or so. This was one of the most fun shoots.

Public Access T.V. – “All We Want”

This was edited from like 20 different videos we tried to make that never got finalized. In the end I realized they worked really well as a collage. It has this eerie “in memoriam” video feel to it or something. Although it was released while they were still together, the band was always on the verge of a break-up… so even at that time it felt fitting for it to have this “RIP Public Access TV” retrospective vibe.

Cults – Spit You Out

This was inspired by ‘Mukbang’, the internet eating phenomenon. It was filmed during Covid quarantine and we had zero equipment, so it was all shot on an iPhone. My producer Jeff Boyardee did the cooking for this… so, technically I guess this shoot had catering.