behind the video with Jackson Devereux (CAVS, "First Light")

I Enjoy Music now has a special sibling website, I Enjoy Music Videos. If you enjoy music videos, you'll like it very much...

Music videos...boy do I enjoy 'em. And when I saw the video for a single off the new CAVS solo record (that's Michael "Cavs" Cavanaugh, drummer for the best rock band in the world, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard) I giggled with delight. Outfitted in a suit that turns him into a sort of Moss Man, CAVS cavorts around a seedy motel room, runs through the streets in cryptid fashion, and plays the drums in a psychedelic blur of blue-green flotsam/jetsam—all over a jaunty jazz tune with trilling flutes and snappy snares.

I love that these visuals get a little weird and groovy with it, especially because as a drummer for King Gizzard, CAVS is usually the most steady and rigorous presence onstage. (I imagine expending extra energy on theatrical drumming motions is unwise for 3+ hour marathon sets.) In this context, it's fun to see him get LOOSE.

I had the opportunity to chat with director Jackson Devereux—a documentary filmmaker who has also shaped the scrappy, dynamic approach to the concert livestreams that Gizz have been so generously sharing with their fans for the past couple of years—about how this pleasantly freaky video vibe came together. Read on for tales of extreme run and gun filmmaking, going against the grain on the color grading, and trying not to get peed on by dogs in Melbourne...

[Molly Mary O'Brien] Will you give me a general history of your filmmaking, and then tell me how you got into music videos?

[Jackson Devereux] I'm actually a documentary filmmaker. I was born and raised in Australia, but I've been in New York for ten years. I've done quite a variety of very different projects: I've worked with LeBron James, telling a story about his I Promise school; I've produced a basketball documentary for Kevin Garnett; I've done stuff where I've implanted with the FBI. I just finished my first feature film [Not One Drop Of Blood] as a director, set in eastern Oregon. It's about cattle mutilation, but it's more about a small rural town where cattle outnumber people fourteen to one.

But in the weird world of connections, after Covid, I ended up getting put in touch with King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, who were looking for somebody who could do livestreams for them. King Gizzard are a very DIY-forward band, who figure out how to do things themselves, and do things their own way. And I think they'd been talking to very traditional livestream companies and production houses, but when I talked to them, we came at it from a documentary background, where we don't need twenty different cameras, and we wanted it to feel immersive and real. And I think something really clicked for Stu [Mackenzie] when we talked. Me and my partner Allen Dobbins—we have a little production company called Heaps Keen—we created a very unique, tour-friendly livestream setup, and we've been on the road with King Gizzard since the fall of 2024.

So I got to really know the Gizzard guys well. On one of the tours, CAVS had said he had a new album coming up. Things lined up where I was going to be in Australia with their tour, and then I filmed a recording session with King Gizzard and Billy String for two weeks and we were like, okay, this is our time to make something happen.

Ah, so I've seen your work, and I remember thinking you were doing so much with so little, camera-wise. It feels way more dynamic than trying to just get every angle possible.

Their DIY mentality meant there was room for us to grow, room for us to fail, and kind of figure things out on the fly. We really align there.

So tell me about the shoot day for "First Light."

I worked very closely with Cavs and Maclay Heriot—Maclay is the tour photographer for Gizzard, but is getting more involved in the video side of things too. He and I were co-directing this recording session for Billy Strings and Gizzard. The three of us, CAVS, Maclay and I, were pinging WhatsApp messages back and forth, trying to figure out what was doable. We had the parameters of budget, and of time—this was done in our side time, amongst twelve hour studio days. So we were like, We've got to be able to do this in a morning. The first music video, "Candiru," is where Cavs pretty much becomes intimate with a tree. So for "First Light," he was like, "Let's just get weird. I just want to be weird." So I was like, why don't we create another chapter in the visual world of this album?

I'm a big camouflage guy. I was like, oh man, what if you become the tree? I didn't know those bushman suits were called ghillie suits at the time. We ordered one on Amazon. We're in Melbourne, this is literally the night before we're shooting. We're still spitballing. He was like, what if we go down to the beach? But the beach was an hour and a half away. So what about a motel?

I searched "worst motel in Melbourne" and found this place, which I don't want to call out. The guy that showed us to all the rooms was a legend, and super lovely. The motel had...a certain charm to it, let me say that. We were looking for something that felt almost like a halfway house for a guy that's become a tree, and made his way back to civilization, and is kind of tweaking at the idea of what to do with his life. We had to go the night before to pay cash and lock the room down. We loaded in at 5am. And thankfully right behind the motel was a little park where we shot the opening to the clip, where he's crossing through the forest. Maclay and I just dragged Cavs in the ghillie suit through town.

That's so funny, because I was going to be like, so what artist made that suit?

Yeah, I'm not a proponent of Amazon, but...Amazon. We spent a big size of the budget on a nice high-level ghillie suit. The next morning when we were in the park, we didn't even have a director's monitor. Maclay is in the pitch black on the phone to me on loudspeaker, trying to shoot from the river up, and I'm babysitting Cavs, who was like, Is a dog going to try to pee on me?

With things coming together so last minute, is there any stress in that for you, or does your temperament as a documentary filmmaker kind of hold stress at bay?

I thrive on the guerrilla style. I thrive on inventing as you go, in adapting to the environment. And I think CAVS, in the lead up, was maybe more used to a pre-planned structured setup. Maclay too, as a tour documentary photographer, we definitely thrive on that inventive spirit. Once we had locked in the environment and the location that we knew had a lot of flavor, it was all about adapting and responding to it. And that's what we really enjoy.

Was there also some freedom in having it be an instrumental song and therefore not necessarily needing to hit certain beats? Of course, the edit feels paced to what the song is, but at least you don't have to worry about nailing lyrics?

One hundred percent. I'm actually working on another music video, which has got some very fast paced lip syncing. But with CAVS, the album is almost like a film score. It's all about vibe, and "First Light" is definitely is more of a groovy song. Once we had that ghillie suit, we were like, okay, it has flow. And CAVS is a lowkey really good dancer. So it all came together.

What was the editing and finalizing process like, in terms of getting it to where it is now?

With the budget, I basically did it pro bono, but I wanted a color grade, and I needed an editor—we had a really tight turnaround, like a week to edit it.

Whoa.

So I pulled in someone I've worked with—a very close collaborator of mine, Sam Barnes, who's also based in Australia. It was super nice knowing that I had an editor that I was mentally in sync with, and on the same taste level. At first we weren't going to use any of the digicam footage. But the nature of our shoot being so on-the-go, it was so hectic, and we had such limited time, you don't often nail the shot. So there was something about the handicam that ended up working, because it was almost like spotting the Sasquatch, you know—or the Yowie, as we call it in Australia. And we used the handicam and all the gear stuff that we do for the live streams, so it kind of tied that world together.

For the edit, my plane back to New York from Australia got delayed—thankfully, because that one day delay, I spent on a Zoom session with Sam. He had done a rough pass that tells you whether or not certain things are working, and we crafted this narrative, that he's returning to the city, crossing through the forest, ends up in this halfway house, and then he's running through the streets kind of lost, trying to find his place in this modern world. So we did that session, then did a night of reviews, came back to it the next day and pretty much locked it off.

And then the big thing for us was getting the color grade, which really brought it home. We got it from Crayon, an outfit based in Melbourne—Sam McCarthy was the colorist. We did a whole day session with him. Even with that, we went a bit more unique. So many things now are cool colors, a very blue shade of things. And I wanted warm. I really wanted to bring out the warmth of the green, like yellow sunlight hitting it. And he really understood. One of our references was No Country for Old Men, and that's got some motel scenes and Western colors. And Paris, Texas was another, with almost a Velvia toned film stock. So that put the polish on for us.

I was going to ask you about the color because I really liked it, especially in the shots where you're kind of freeze-framing? I feel like the green stood out as you were kind of getting abstract with it, in a way that made sense with the music as well.

That was the other thing I had to do. On the last day of our time together, I was like, Put the ghillie suit back on, play the drums, we'll do it in super slow shutter speed. I was going for, like, a photo where the subject's in focus, but everything's kind of blurred out. And right out front of the studios, there were these blue flowers in full bloom, so I had him walk back and forth to get one of those shots. Melbourne's very beautiful, it has lots of wooded spaces. And we walked down and so many people were taking pictures of him on the street, and in the phone booth. It was a massive traffic jam down this main street. We'd look over and every car would be filming him.

Amazing. Last question. Do you have any favorite music videos?

There's a filmmaker called Noah Kentis, and he worked with this artist, Junior Mesa. They've got some really cool music video clips that I love, that have that element of documentary in them. There's one called "will i love again?" It just so happened I saw it in the lead up to the CAVS stuff, and I loved the vibe.

And then there's another one, "good time," where I think they just spent heaps of time in Bakersfield, and they used this actor that Noah has used in all his other stuff.

What also came to mind, and fits this fisheye lens look thing that we've got, is Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic." I think that one's the one that's forever etched in my mind of seeing it as a teenager.

Thank you Jackson! Check out his work on his website here. And listen to the new CAVS solo album, Sojourn, out everywhere now.

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