A music video/documentary hybrid, Digits tracks the rise and fall of 2 finger-giving Euro terrorists and their sodapop-sucking foe.
Digits was constructed as if a CIA investigator's file cabinet exploded and its fragmented remnants were pieced together to illustrate a foreign, distant mystery. Our work is usually more rigidly narrative but with this video we were interested in suggesting a story rather than pounding one down, fact by crystal clear fact.
As if key chapters in the biography about these female terrorists had been burned, what seems to be missing from the story enhances the suspense, we hope, and suggests a world, a reign, and a narrative even larger and atmospheric than what the piece actually presents.
Visually, we were turned on by our newfound access to digital technology, toying with all the ways to take the harsh, banal look of the video medium and create something exotic and rich in appearance. Each vignette is pushed and pulled overtly into potent, almost stereotyped cinematic and news-media styles. What might be missing in dialogue or narrative clarity is replaced by thick, brash visual (and thus), emotional moods, and therefore the very look of the film almost acts as the script/screenplay/structure itself.
As the piece is coated in a self-conscious hipness, we wanted to poke holes in our constructed coolness by adding depreciating doses of humor and banality. Inspired by photographs of the German Baider Meinhoff activists, there was something compelling about images of its terrorists writhing ferociously in the arms of law enforcement in one photo, and then flipping to a previous picture depicting cell members slouching in a drab hotel room, wearing knee socks, munching on snack crackers and loafing like harmless nobodies. Digits, like all our work whips together the dramatically bizarre with the silliness of the ordinary, and becomes something funky but sweetly humble as well.

William Scott Rees