Bloomington’s Thee Tsunamis have a very special Valentine’s Day gift to share with the world, and it comes in the form of a badass music video.

Today, the rock ‘n’ roll trio presents the video for their song “Kill Kill Kill,” which appears on their latest full-length album Saturday Night Sweetheart (Magnetic South/Burger Records). For the video, Betsy, Jenna and Sharlene called upon the animation talents of Indianapolis’ BrainTwins, having them create a visual accompaniment that’s appropriately sinister.

Below, check out an email interview Seth Johnson did with Jessica Dunn and Justin Shimp of BrainTwins discussing specifics of the “Kill Kill Kill” video.

Seth Johnson: How was the plot for the "Kill Kill Kill" video decided upon?

BrainTwins: We were talking with Sharlene about wanting to do a video for Thee Tsunamis, and she had a concept she wanted to play with for “Kill Kill Kill.” Sharlene wanted animated alien versions of the band members going to a drive-in with their dates. The movie they were watching would be live action footage (which Sharlene shot on her phone during vacation last year), and at the end of the song (SPOILER ALERT!), Thee (alien) Tsunamis would eat their dates' brains and fly off in a spaceship. We also talked about how we loved going to drive-in movies, and Brain Twins and Thee Tsunamis share a love of old B-Movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s. We wanted to capture the nostalgia of that era in this video but also spin it from a contemporary perspective (much like Thee Tsunamis' music). Additionally, depictions of females from that era in media/cinema mostly show women as the weak damsels in distress (and they are usually the ones senselessly stalked and killed in those old films), so we decided to turn the tables in this story. Overall, we really loved and resonated with Sharlene's concept and Jessica directed the video based on that, while specific plot points developed and changed a bit during the animation process. 

SJ: In what ways did you try to make elements of the video specifically fit with elements of the song?

BT: In every video we make, we really listen to the music and let the song set the pacing of the story and inspire the visual elements and the way they move, transition, etc. When we met with Sharlene, we all listened to the song together and picked out some specific sounds to play with (like the echoing in the final chorus) and what kind of visuals might go there. After our meeting, Jessica listened to the song probably 30 times at least while she made some general storyboards and came up with the details of the story. The song's structure motivated the pacing of the plot: verses are like "acts" of the story, the guitar solo became the intermission and final choruses became the build-up to the climax of our story. After we had the main plot in place with the song, we decided to play with elements of three where we would rotate between the three band members, and from there we started playing with specific nuances of the sounds and the way the animation moved in response. 

SJ: What'd you enjoy most about the video-making process?

BT: With this video, we really enjoyed putting in details like "easter eggs" inspired by the album art for Saturday Night Sweetheart, pop culture references, and even a couple cameos! Magnetic South (the label who released the album) makes an appearance as an animated character in the drive-in intermission segment for example. The intermission segment was especially fun to animate as we went on a tangent and somehow landed on hotdogs doing ballet and sexy pizzas in fishnets. We did a lot of research and watched hours of old drive-in movie intermissions online and some of them are really crazy and psychedelic. Many times when we were watching this old footage for inspiration, we would end up laughing and wondering how the artists got away with some of the more demented sequences, like cartoon food cooking themselves only to be transformed into live action food and eaten by a child. 

SJ: Overall, what do you like about how it turned out?

BT: It was really interesting to see how the video developed throughout the time spent working on it. This is definitely one of the most ambitious animations we have created so far, and it’s been in the process of creation for months, but because of that there are so many details and ideas put into it over time that we feel really make it special. We hope the band, the fans and others enjoy it just as much as we enjoyed making it.