Tiga
Hot In Herre

Label: !K7 Records
Role: Co-Director with Thomas Sontag

In 2004, I co-directed the music video for Tiga's cover of Nelly's "Hot In Herre" with Thomas "Lord of The Marionette" Sontag (aka Thomas von Party aka Tiga's brother).

My first meeting with Tiga was at Piano's, a music venue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a few blocks from my apartment at the time.

We had about 5 minutes to talk before he went on, and Darshan Jesrani of Metro Area was finishing up his set in the other room. Tiga told me about how his brother Thomas had started to perform with a marionette at their big monthly party in Montreal. They'd project the puppet dancing onto a screen next to the DJ and people would go nuts.  I had pitched a completely different concept, which got me the meeting in the first place, but Tiga wanted to know if I would collaborate with his brother to have this marionette star in the video. I said hell yes.

Thomas and I hit it off immediately and our loose concept quickly escalated into a full-blown rap video, where we'd borrow shamelessly from every current hit on MTV.

We had just a few weeks before Thomas would fly down to shoot with me for a weekend, and in that time we had to create sets, costumes, and props on a shoestring budget. The kicker was that Thomas only had two identical marionettes, both in traditional tuxedo costumes, plus a goofy-looking dog marionette.

It wasn't long before the whole Eyeball family was helping out. Limore Shur and Rachel Riggs created looping graphic backgrounds for reverse projection onto the largest sheet of ground glass I could afford, and Hyejin Hwang designed and assembled an entire wardrobe of doll clothing. Thomas and I shot for three days — me lighting and shooting and him puppeteering —trying every crazy idea we could think of. We thought it was hilarious but we had no idea if anyone else would get it. 

Tiga, Jennifer Masset (then U.S. label manager at !K7) and I brought the video up to MTV and screened it for the first time. No one in the audience even cracked a smile.

This wasn't a room of old executives, it was a group of twenty-somethings who should have loved it. Jen was still optimistic, but Tiga and I were despondent. A few days later MTV wrote to !K7 that they would not air the video. But after releasing it on the internet, the video was an overnight sensation and MTV suddenly found a slot for it. Suddenly we had a global hit. Except in the Czech Republic.

Mike Eastwood, executive producer at Eyeball, got a call from a reporter in Prague asking for a comment on the fact the video had just been banned there. WTF?

The journalist explained that Spejbl — the marionette we had dressed in gansta bling and fashioned into a girl puppet with a culo like J-Lo — was equivalent to Mickey Mouse for the Czech people. Furthermore (and previously unknown to me), Spejbl was a national symbol of chastity and was often used to teach lessons on abstinence from sex, drugs, and alcohol to children.

Unsurprisingly, the next call we received was from lawyers. Thankfully for us, Spejbl was between owners and without legal rights. We reached an agreement but the attention only helped the video reach a wider audience.

Later that year, Thomas and I were nominated for 3 MVPA awards — best video under $20k, best electronic video, and best choreography, which we lost to Beyoncé's "Crazy In Love." Go figure. We did win a New York Festivals Gold World Medal, and a special place in the hearts of marionette lovers everywhere.