E-Mail This Article to a Friend MUSIC-VIDEO SHOOT ... And you will know us by the trail of annoyed BY CAMILLE DODERO

They’re a proggy, arty, riffy rock band from Austin, Texas, with a mouthful of a name: … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. Nicknamed Trail of Dead, they’re also the Interscope-backed band who were beloved by rock critics two full-length albums ago, Source Tags & Codes (2002), but then widely maligned when music scribes panned their overly dramatic last record, Worlds Apart (2005). They’re also a conceptually bloated band, one you wouldn’t expect to allow a gaggle of college students to film their next music video. But that’s just what happened this past Tuesday — at the Middle East Downstairs, no less — when a handpicked crew of Emerson film undergrads helmed a two-day production for Trail of Dead’s next single from Worlds Apart, "Caterwaul." The notion was so unusual that even Evan Kenney, vocalist/guitarist for Boston indie rockers Read Yellow, who’d come along to be an extra with bassist bandmate Michelle Kay, briefly wondered whether the set-up was a prank. "On the way here we were like, ‘Is this real?’ Or are we getting Punk’d?"

Ashton Kutcher wasn’t anywhere to be found, but the project did turn out to be affiliated with MTV. Last fall, MTV approached Amy Grill, manager of Emerson Television Channels, about collaborating on a student production for its new round-the-clock college station, MTVU. That query eventually led to MTV hooking up Interscope and Trail of Dead with Emerson for its university-version of the Viacom-owned channel’s behind-the-scenes series, Making the Video. (Boston University also recently announced a partnership with MTVU for a student-made sit-com.) Once the deal was set and the finished product guaranteed to run on MTVU — according to Grill, with Interscope footing the bill and paying Emerson — Grill held an open call for video treatments. Student director Pearl Wible was chosen for what was essentially a performance video.

So during the Tuesday shoot, a two-man MTVU film crew documented the process for Making the Video, wandering around with a sheet of probing questions like:

Questions for the band:

Did these students bite off more than they could chew?

Questions for the college students:

What’s it like working with the band? Are they [sic] Diva’s?

During their afternoon first-day shoot, Trail of Dead didn’t prove to be divas, exactly, but singer/guitarist Conrad Keely certainly taught Wible her first professional lesson: sometimes being a film director is an awful lot like being a babysitter. Perhaps Keely isn’t used to being a sidekick: usually he’s the frontman, but on "Caterwaul" guitarist Jason Reece sings. So when it came time to film Reece’s on-stage close-ups, Keely did everything he could to screw with his founding bandmate. He pulled a plastic bag over his head and bounced around, bumping into Reece and ruining the shot. He screamed The Muppet Show theme, used the guitar cord like a whip, and intermittently shouted weird-for-weird’s-sake things like, "I want my Oompa-Loompas now!" His antics were contagious: by the end of the day’s shoot, a monitor was dropped, the drum set got kicked around, and bassist Danny Wood (no relation to the New Kids on the Block member of the same name) got thrown into the side-stage control board.

The band’s shots wrapped up a little after 4:30 p.m. — ahead of schedule, thanks to the Emerson crew’s ability to mollify ensuing chaos — and crew member Jeb Heil was looking for Wible. On-set casting director Linnea Toney whispered to him, "I think Pearl’s in the back room giving the band a talking-to."