Making the Video: 'Iraq' (Part 2)

By now it's November 8th, 2006. At 4 AM 2 truck loads of people and equipment came to my house to pick me up and head out to the desert, east of San Diego. It was like a 2 hour drive, and I spent most of the drive beating Alvin in Madden on PSP. It was already hot when we arrived around 6 AM, and it just kept getting hotter as the day went on.

A lot of people think I was in front of a green screen in a cold studio somewhere, but unfortunately I wasn't. I was wearing a black hoody and jeans in the middle of the desert! That part wasn't fun. Neither was the 15 border patrol agents who rolled up on us during the middle of a take to see if we were terrorists or something. We told them we were shooting a music video and they left us alone. Luckily they didn't ask us what the song was called! Haha, I think the video would've had a different ending if they did.

We went through the song about 100 times throughout the 12 hour day. All different angles, all different locations. Ron actually made me go walking all around the sand which was pretty tough (see above), and he didn't use any of it! By mid day it was just too hot so the crew drove 20 minutes to Arizona for lunch. So when we got back we had to race against time before the sun went down. No one wanted to have to come back again to reshoot. But we got it done and by the end of the day everyone was drained... full of sand... and ready to go home.

The next day we actually did some shooting in the streets of Downtown, San Diego. Ron had a cool idea about the end of the video. I was supposed to drop the mic in the streets before I walked off. The image on the screen was supposed to transform from the desert scene to the street scene, symbolizing that the war is an issue both overseas and here at home. But it didn't make the cut for whatever reason.