San Francisco five-piece Young Prisms play hazy, shoegaze tunes like every day is Monday. It's not quite gloomy, but there's a subtle melancholy to their music that is as reflective of their hometown as it is the events they've gone through the past few years (including spending a week stranded at Heathrow Airport and dealing with the death of a friend).

So we weren't too surprised when we found out the concept behind their new music video for "Midnight's When" (which we've got the premiere of today). "A friend from Los Angeles grudgingly calls San Francisco's foggy summer weather 'bizarro summer,'" explains director Andrew Stephen Lee, adding, "The idea came about when cinematographer Andrew Crighton and I were hanging out in Golden Gate Park. It's usually overcast--the fog and wind are ripping through you. We tried to build connections to the visual aesthetic of a San Franciscan summer."

There's also a cinematic quality to the film--not a big shocker that Lee cites the final, quiet scene at the end of The 400 Blows as inspiration--particularly when the band comes in focus. "There's an intimate, ethereal quality to the song [and] I tried to reflect this subtlety in Stef when she's quietly singing. It's almost as if she's telling you a secret," explains Lee.

The other cinematic, almost Lynch-ian moment happened off-camera; while shooting a scene in a Frisco alleyway in the Mission, Lee remembers a strange spectator. "There was a guy watching us and talking on his cellphone. For some reason he had a few empty baby car seats with him--you can see them in some shots towards the end," he recalls. "I like to think he was watching how weird the cinematographer and I looked, hanging out of the back of a Volvo station wagon."
REBECCA WILLA DAVIS

---

RATE THIS STORY
Your Name (*)
Your Email (*)	Your email address will not be shown
Rate (*)
Comment (*)
Enter the code shown in the image (*)