There were a number of early video attempts for Better Days during the demo period, including one in which we tried to emulate the retro technology themes of the artwork, but the quality really wasn't good enough to use (and anyway I think a lot of the footage was lost in a computer crash).
The off-colour negative footage was recorded in Leeds in around 2008, but we didn't really have much to go in the middle section, so my right hand plays the part of Simon here.
The first video that we completed was the extremely dull one for I'll Give You Electro. We really just wanted to test the water, and see what would happen if we released something on YouTube, and it did reasonably well. I think the main reason that we never got around to doing a proper video was this...
Sappy has a track record of making videos for all his remixes, clearly demonstrating that he knows what he's doing rather more than we do where promotion is concerned. I find the grainy footage of woodlands gives it a slight darkness which isn't there in the audio, but it works rather well altogether - I particularly like the different fonts used to say "electro".
Eyeballing was the first of our proper videos to ever see the light of day, as Sappy made his own visuals for the song by cutting together excerpts from old footage. The floating squares and chevrons make for a slightly retro feel, but it's pretty effective.
Here Comes the Summertime was actually the first video we made, way back in 2008 while we were working on the early demo versions of the album
It also has the rare distinction of only having come out as a single because of the video. The original intention when Transmission came out was to release some kind of video for a number of tracks, not just the singles. But Here Comes the Summertime is one of the longest tracks on the album, and we couldn't really be bothered filming enough footage to keep it interesting for five minutes. So we started work on an edit, and everything just spiralled out of control from there.
In the end, the plan to make lots of videos never actually came to fruition because we were too busy, and also we didn't know what we were doing with the video editing software, as you can probably tell.
Sappy's version of the video takes some of the footage from ours, but also uses some fun 3D model footage, which mixes in rather well actually.
