Getting Hyperreal with Local Filmmaker Travis Lee Ratcliff

What’s the cost of building the perfect pop star? Can one make bops without sacrificing their humanity and free will? These are a few questions that Al Pacino and writer, director, editor, and producer Travis Lee Ratcliff have grappled with. Inspired by the viral “I Feel Fantastic” video that’s haunted the internet for years, Travis and musician Lena Luca used the music video for Luca’s song “Rosebuds” to create a world where a robot pop princess finds captivity and eventual independence in the world of superstardom. 

A few days after showing his music video at Hyperreal Film Club’s September screening of Friday the 13th Part IX: Jason Lives, Travis sat down with us to talk about his music video, collaborating with Lena Luca, and other unsettling videos living in the depths of the world wide web.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Who came up with the idea for this music video?

In this situation, it was really perfect how it worked out. I had an idea for a music video in the summer, and then in the fall Lena reached out and sent us her song. My cinematographer, Brody Carmichael, had just finished shooting a series of music videos for the musician Mobley. Lena had been involved in those music videos, so she found us through that and sent us her song. She didn't have a preexisting idea of exactly what she wanted to do, but I had already been looking for an artist whose music and vibe matched the aesthetic that I had in mind for this theoretical music video idea, and her song felt like a really good fit.

You unleashed a core memory of mine with this video. It was a one-of-a-kind video someone decided to upload onto YouTube. It was so cool to see you elaborate on that video and add your own spin.

Just to give even more context to the readers, the origin of the idea is a viral video that began circulating in the early days of the Internet. The creator of the video on his website at the time declared that he was creating a new pop star for the Internet era. And the video is terrifying! If you've ever seen it, you'd never forget it because it feels like it was broadcast from another dimension and into our own. One of the fascinating things about it is that no one knows what happened to the guy who made the video. No one knows what happened to this android that he built. There's all of this mystery, and in the void space of that mystery, all of these legends and lores and conspiracy theories have grown and spread.

What was it like directing Lena? Did she help bridge some gaps in your main idea for this video?

Lena was an incredibly generous collaborator. From the beginning, she really took up the idea and understood what we were trying to do and helped us weave it into her really subversive performance style. I think the kind of pop music that Lena Luca is making is self-aware and playing with the idea of a pop star already. I think she's really conscientious of what it is to make pop music in this time. When she was collaborating with our stylist, Kaidon Ho, and Emily Basma—our producer who was responsible for a lot of the styling as well—I think that Lena was making a really significant contribution in denoting how she would be depicted and embodying the presence of that pop energy.

This is not an easy performance role. It requires a lot of subtle, unspoken changes and embodying different states of being throughout the flow of the piece as this android awakens. She hasn't acted a whole lot, to my knowledge, but she understood exactly what we were trying to do and completely embodied the role.

How did you pair your visual and narrative ideas with Lena’s song?

One of the real fundamental challenges in doing music video work is marrying a song to an idea. That can happen at any point of conceptualization, whether the song comes first, or the idea comes first. You're always trying to weave this kind of visual medium to what is intrinsically not a visual medium.

I had actually sat down and written a script called “Vengeance of the Love Machine” before I had ever met Lena or heard her song. I didn't write it with the intent of making it as a short film. I knew that it would become a music video, but I felt that I had to first write it as a script in order to understand how to adapt it into a music video. So, when Lena brought us the song, I listened to it and I became snared in the imagery of the song, the kind of mysteries and ambiguities that were laid into it that I thought really could play well in marrying these two separate creative things together. The next step for me was to take that script and essentially map the beats of the script over the lyrics of the song. I did this first in a written form, and then I took it into an edit and started pre-editing the shot list of the music video over the physical song in the edit.

Describe the process of bringing the android to life in this music video. Y’all do such a good job making it look like the original one.

[This] was the thing that scared me the most about the project. When I'm taking something on, there will be a real object of fear in the project. I'm attracted to things that I don't know how to do, and that scare me a little bit. For me, the scary challenge here was that we needed to create a facsimile of this uncanny, clunky, one-of-a-kind internet phenomenon, but we also needed it to accurately represent and be recognizable as Lena.

If you've seen the original video, there isn't much visually recognizable to it. It looks like it was filmed in a home-built set, so there's not a whole lot to grab onto visually. My concern [from there] was “What is recognizable then?” So, I started Google reverse image searching for the sweater [of the original android], and I found on some random eBay vintage reseller the exact same piece.

Once I found that, I knew that we could get away with a lot more in being liberal with how we reproduced the android. We could lean more into accurately reproducing Lena’s visage in this form. Once we hit that, we partnered with special effects makeup artist Jenna Green, who created a latex mask of Lena’s face. She could have made a perfect replica of Lena’s face, but instead, we told her to lean into the uncanniness to make it feel more in the character and spirit of the original video.

Going back to Kaidon Ho and Emily Basma’s role in the costuming and styling, I wanted to explore that process more. Lena wears a good amount of different fits in this music video.

One of my favorite features of the music video—and it was hard to defend how much we were cramming in [Laughs]—but it was so important that we create a montage of looks that accurately portrayed this idea of a pop star being programmed. I think that the maximalism of that really did something to articulate, on a narrative level, what's happening to this android as she is processing this hallucinatory vision of herself as a pop star. Hopefully it creates the kind of video that you can watch multiple times and discover new and interesting things.

For this montage of looks, I really delegated Emily and Kaidon once they knew what I was after emotionally. Emily is an obsessive cinephile of music videos and pop star aesthetics, so she was really responsible for bringing visual ideas to me that created this contrast, but also recognizability of specific looks, specific eras, and specific genres that also felt unique to us and compatible with Lena’s aesthetic. Kaidon worked with a lot of independent designers and sourced outfits and pieces from all over that created a really unique bespoke aesthetic for each of those looks.

What are some other strange, mysterious or weird videos in the backwoods of the internet that stick with you?

I'm really fascinated by pieces of media that predate the internet and that have now entered into the internet and developed a whole new culture around them. Possibly in Michigan is this incredible video that has now started to circulate and become viral on TikTok. It uses autotuned, sung dialog and demonstrates an uncanny, monstrous man in an 80s shopping mall. It's a perfect example of something that lives in a similar universe to the “I Feel Fantastic” video, but was crafted by a real trailblazing female avant garde filmmaker—Cecelia Condit—in the 1980s and has been recontextualized in an uncanny found footage context.

Another instance that was really fascinating was a broadcast signal intrusion in the 1980s where someone hacked into a public British broadcast and started sending a video signal of himself wearing a scary mask. A whole generation of kids who happened to be watching TV for those 15 seconds were shaped by this thing that they weren't sure was real or not. Those instances of authentic, almost analog media that is then brought into the internet era and takes on new meaning and legend [are] what's really fascinating to me.

If the creator of “I Feel Fantastic” came across this music video, how do you think they’d feel about it?

I think they should be so excited to see how much love and passion and enthusiasm has emerged around something they made so long ago. That's not just in regards to our music video. I think there is an incredible abundance of commentary and lore and legend. Not all of it would feel complimentary, but all of us who make things want those things to be seen, to be appreciated, and to make an impact in some way. You can't say that the video that he made all those years ago didn't have an impact. It's had a tremendous impact on internet culture and on so many people. It's shaped through the nightmares of now multiple generations, and that is so visible across the internet, even today, as it finds a new life in TikTok videos and in commentary by a whole new generation.

What other projects are next for you to tackle?

I have a production company, Movement House, that primarily makes commercials and commissioned short documentaries. All of our collaborators, including Emily and Brody, work on our projects. The thing that I have been working on for the last four years and in haste in the last year, is a short investigative documentary called Under My Command that is being supported by an Austin Film Society grant program. It tells the 40-year history of hypnosis being used by Texas law enforcement which has now been proven to have resulted in countless wrongful convictions and many individuals being sent to Texas death row. Our film tells the story of one specific individual who's currently awaiting execution on Texas death row for a crime he's always maintained he didn't commit. We’re expecting it to come out next year.

Final question: Where or who is the music video’s android with as of now?

She is currently in Brody’s closet. When his mother came to visit once recently, she opened the closet and was horrified by the jump scare of seeing this android lurking in the shadows. So, she continues to live and haunt the world to this day.

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