Charli XCX — Used to Know Me

Like the lyrics to my favorite Widowspeak song, “everything is simple, ’til it’s not.” Used To Know Me sounds simple. One house, one day, Charli playing dress-up in a domestic fantasy that keeps escalating: bedroom, bathroom, Victorian, zesty nun, cheerleader, 1920s flapper pool, EDM rave, jazzercise, kitchen counter BDSM. Nine costume looks: the wigs, the makeup, the choreography for each of them. Shot on 35mm, three perf, on a Panavision package big enough that we had to raise our company’s insurance coverage just to rent it. Wait, simple?

The house was a mid-century place in Long Beach, on the same street as the house from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, owned by people who worked in production themselves and knew exactly what they had. It was also the first house the creative team sent me, and after weeks of scouting alternatives the answer came back the way it always does when the creatives are right: this is the location. So my job became making the place affordable.

Halfway through prep, our DP told me the day only worked if we could light in a leap-frog manner, and that meant people and gear we hadn’t budgeted. He was right, btw. I went back for more money before the shoot and… I love Charli’s team :)

Then there were the brand integrations, which had to land (fast) with the choreography and song, or the day was gonna fall apart: an Amazon box in the cold open, packed so it would unwrap on camera in one move, and a perfectly misted drink glass by the pool for a one-shot the camera glides through. Both worked on the day. Charli had been drilling the choreography for weeks (we filmed just before her album tour) and a lot of the schedule quietly hinged on her nailing it. She nailed it.

One partner later watched the cut, decided a cheerleader outfit from a different moment signaled something their fizzy drink couldn’t align with, and left the video in post. The pool scene stayed. We removed the logo from the glasses of, you’ll never guess, Fanta? Yup! All’s well that ends well. Unless…

The first cut came back… flat: Charli in normal land, Charli contemplative on the toilet, then suddenly Victorian, with nothing in the cut carrying you from the real world into the imaginary one. Not to mention, the Amazon moment was taking too long at the top. We had to find a way. The budget for starting over was gone, and I was already doing some VFX on the intro, so I gave the recut to the only person left in the budget, me.

The 35mm was tack sharp (a first AC doing their job is a beautiful thing, and so is detail-preserving upscale in After Effects), which meant I could punch in and build camera moves we never shot. The first costume snap needed to feel like a jump between worlds. Star Fox spoke to me in a dream. I rolled the frame. It worked! The graphics team had made a different title card for every look, each one thematically gorgeous, so I splashed them in. My favorite adjustment came from addressing the Amazon Prime timing moment. The cut needed a runway at the top, so I needed sound. Taking a tactic from a 2-figure video, I accessed the UTKM stems, retimed, reverbed, and built a build to preamble the actual needle drop on this 6-figure video. I did not know if that was okay. When the creative director saw it, she really liked the intention, and had Charli’s music director make a custom track to fill that timing. I’m still so stoked on that.

The video came out, did good numbers, and everyone got paid real money (music videos sometimes only pay in stardust and dreams); the only casualty of the whole job was one ceiling light tile, which wasn’t actually broken, it had to be turned 90°. Used To Know Me was 4 years ago. If I got this job today I’d lock the brand architecture faster and put myself deeper inside the creative conversation from the start, which is not a note on anybody so much as what four more years of life and learning buys you.

Used To Know Me is positioned at a frontier point for Charli. Crash was the self-aware sellout album, and Used To Know Me was the last album single release before brat. My read, which is just my own, is that the energy was already all there, one album before it clarified. I’m not the lore person. But we love YouTube comments. Lightning went into a bottle. Then it came out.