In a futuristic India where large and menacing technologically advanced aircraft hover over the city, police dressed in riot gear with long sharp needle-noses set below goggles hunt for a mysterious tattooed girl who has a strange microfilm...

You Say Party is a band from British Columbia, described as “Canadian dance punk artists.”  They are garnering a lot of buzz in the international music scene for their music, and are, from all accounts, nice people to know.  With the completion of their album XXXX, they turned to Sean Wainsteim, an up and coming director who worked with them on a previous music video, Monster. 

Sean leans towards fantasy and science fiction imagery in his music videos, and has a working relationship with Steve Manale, a Toronto cartoonist and the creator of the webcomic Superslackers.  Sean came to Steve with an idea, and Steve created the boards, costumes and designs for Lonely's Lunch.

There are a lot of elements of cyberpunk in the video.  Looming airships look like they're straight out of District 9.  The police uniforms have a distinct cyberpunk feel.  Technology is hacked together, and digital information is a major part of the story.

I had the opportunity to ask Steve about the cyberpunk elements of Lonely’s Lunch, and he offered the following behind the scenes look.

FROM STEVE MANALE:

The treatment for You Say Party's 'Lonely's Lunch' was written by Sean Wainsteim.

There's a continuing theme in Sean's videos-- that man loves a chase. Sean wanted a location far removed from Canada (birthplace of YSP), so he contacted his old friend and collaborator Shanker Raman, the cinematographer of Aamir Khan's 'Peepli Live', and most recently the staggeringly beautiful 'Autumn' (which showed at this year's TIFF festival). Shanker is stationed in India, so we shot the video there with a team he assembled.

You Say Party are just about the coolest band in the world when it comes to creative collaboration and interpretation of their work, and were fully on board with letting Sean treat the song as the score for a mini film as opposed to a performance video with snippets of the story. It's pretty uncommon to have a video without the band in it. 
 

That gave us an amazing amount of freedom.

The slight story in the video is deliberately hazy, but involves a spy on the run from malefic troopers who indicate the near future, or an alternate dimension.Sean wanted it to appear that only the troops would be allowed any tech. Any other tech would appear stolen, improvised or cobbled together in a makeshift fashion.

  
I did some trooper designs that started very elephant-y and ended up looking more mosquito-y, which ultimately we liked better.
 

Sean and I are both longtime comic book and sci-fi fans in general, so  the look of the soldiers in the video was influenced by a few things we love– old Paul Pope and Moebius comics, plague doctors, Micronauts,and Garindan, the Imperial spy from Star Wars (whom I always loved).
 

After that it was time to scribble down some very rough shooting boards as time was tight for this project. Not fancy, but they did the trick.

As you can see, a lot of shots had to be scrapped/ improvised because of the crazy unpredictable nature of the location– the busiest street market I've ever seen.
 

Maybe we'll have to go back to India and shoot a sequel to see if our heroine hatches another plan...

The end result is a great, fast-paced music video with some solid cyberpunk themes and visuals.  Although, they never explained the significance of the neck tattoo...

A final, bittersweet note:  The video was dedicated to You Say Party's Devon Clifford, their drummer who died suddenly of a brain aneurism.

The video is below.  You can buy the You Say Party album XXXX here.