Roll Call: One Move Through the Whole Building

Roll Call was the lead single for COSM, Class of Strange Music. Tech N9ne plus Rittz, King Iso, Joey Cool, JL, Lex Bratcher and X-Raided. Seven artists on one record is usually a scheduling problem you solve with seven setups and a lot of cutting. I went the other way: one continuous moving shot through the entire Strange Music building, treating the place we all work as the video itself.

The building is the video

Everybody shoots at Strange. The soundstage, the studios. But nobody had made the building the star. Offices, hallways lined with plaques, the booths, the warehouse, the weight room, the kitchen. The campus is a portrait of the label, and a roll call is a portrait of the roster. The idea was to let the camera take attendance.

Mapping the path

I walked the building with the song until the architecture and the track agreed with each other, then placed each artist in their environment along the route, so the video moves like a relay and every handoff introduces the next name. Tech starts it in his real office, the actual one, and walks out to the weight room. King Iso owns the weight room, which is honestly an equipment room we emptied out and repurposed for the day, then heads up the stairs to find Joey Cool in the recording booth. Joey steps out to the balcony and throws the phone down to JL, who is running the party in the warehouse. JL kicks through the door to Lex Bratcher, who is teaching the Sickology 101 class. She walks out past video village, which hands us to X-Raided in the edit bay, and he crosses over to the conference room, where Rittz is mid-meeting. Rittz closes it out heading into the kitchen, where the whole class sits down at the break area and shares a meal. Attendance taken.

The suit walking the halls early with a phone to his ear is X-Raided, and the comic thought bubble over his head, I have an idea for a video, is there to set up where he lands: the edit bay, playing a pirate character.

The classroom that isn't there

If you tried to visit the Sickology 101 classroom, you would walk into a garage door. We built it as a set, dressed to match the offices in our building, and parked it in front of the garage door to the soundstage so the geography would keep flowing. The chalkboard says Sickology 101 because if the album is called Class of Strange Music, somebody has to teach the class.

The morning after

The hook was the twist that made the structure work. The verses walk the building the morning after: streamers hanging off the bar, cups everywhere, everyone slightly too composed. Every time the hook lands, we flash back to the party from the night before, same rooms, lights low, packed and loud. The building in the verses is the evidence. The hook is the crime. That contrast gave a walking tour a story: you are not just meeting the class, you are piecing together what they did last night.

Five or six runs per artist

We shot the artist sections on Steadicam, about five or six full runs for each rapper's part, then stitched the sections in the edit so the whole thing reads as one unbroken move. A move that long is unforgiving even in pieces: every artist is a mark, every doorway is a handoff, and a miss at the end of a section means the section resets. We rehearsed the walk until the timing lived in everybody's legs, not just mine.

What the frame hides, and what it lost

The hallway we snake down at the top of the video, heading into Tech's office, has a door that leads outside, and on camera it looked terrible, blasting daylight into the frame. So we quickly built and painted a faux wall and stood it in the doorway. Look closely and you can still catch a sliver of daylight peeking around the edge.

And the phone throw from Joey to JL was supposed to be even crazier. We rigged a 360 camera to track the phone falling from the balcony. The footage came back corrupt off a bad SD card, so the version that exists is the one you see.

Roll Call has pulled over five million views, and the thing people say back to me is always some version of the same sentence: it feels like you got to walk through Strange Music. That was the whole pitch.

Tech N9ne Collabos: Roll Call

What it taught me

• Map the path first. When the route is right, the blocking, the timing and the edit are already half made.
• Put people where they live. Tech's real office beats any set, and when you do need a set, build it to match the building.
• Structure is the twist. The flashback hook cost nothing extra to shoot and gave a walking tour a story.