“Water? Coffee? Gushers? Fruit by the Foot?” offered director Connor Wiles as his volunteer crew carried equipment past classrooms filled with board games and crates of toys. Over two days in mid-November, Wiles and his partner in the production company New Trash, Nat Alder, turned part of the Kidz Express Boys & Girls Club in Austin into a music-video set for Chicago hip-hop duo Mother Nature. This was to be New Trash’s 30th video in less than three years, and they’ve developed a vibrant, playful style both despite and because of their typically minuscule budgets—the Mother Nature shoot would cost about $500.
“They throw chips at you if you answer trivia questions, and Nat was just ringing them out. He had more chips than he could carry,” Wiles says. Through their four years at Columbia, where they both pursued BFAs in Cinema Art and Science, they became friends and colleagues, filling roles on each other’s productions.
At Kidz Express, Alder and Wiles were making a video for Mother Nature’s unreleased song “Simple.” In April of this year they’d booked the duo—Shasta Matthews, aka Klevah Knox, and Tierney Reed, aka T.R.U.T.H.—to perform at a New Trash video-release party for Chicago pop artist Liska Steele. They hadn’t seen Mother Nature perform before, and they were bowled over by the rappers’ command of the stage. Alder and Wiles screened the duo’s video for “This Yo Year” at the party too. “That’s where we met New Trash,” said Matthews, as she weaved metal rings into Reed’s hair for the shoot. “They were just playing videos, and then they played our video, which they didn’t do—but they celebrated us, you know?”
For New Trash, DIY isn’t a philosophy so much as a reality they’ve adapted to—making videos with little more than passion for the work. “If somebody told me they would give me money to direct a Nickelodeon show,” Wiles jokes, “I would be out of here in a fucking second.”
Wiles talked the kids through each take, and when Kidz Express assistant director Marco Dodd could take a break from his duties, he stepped in as an acting coach. For a scene where nine-year-old Danielle Reed was supposed to throw a script binder off her directing chair in frustration, he called, “Act like you’re mad at your brother!”
The shoot was calmer with grown-up subjects, but it didn’t go entirely smoothly. New Trash had to abort several indoor takes when a snow machine malfunctioned. Even after Alder figured out how to fix its delay in dispensing fake flurries, the snow still wouldn’t blow toward the camera properly—the crew were stumped until Mikolyuk pointed to a vent in the ceiling. The shot was worth the trouble, though: Matthews and Reed leaned into each other against the sudden blizzard, taking pratfalls that drew laughs from the handful of people who’d gathered to watch.
