"Snapping Turtle"

A forgotten test shoot, resurrected for a music video

A while back, I sent a rough cut of a film I wasn’t all that happy with to a couple friends.

One of them said, “You need to finish it.”
The other said, “It’s not working... but maybe it could work for something else?”
They mused: “Maybe a music video.”

Fast forward a few weeks: I was driving around with a 3-year-old in the back seat, blaring Fire Sign by

S.G. Goodman

. He loves the repetition—Who'll put the fire out? Who'll put the fire out?—and sings along, loudly.

As soon as it ends, he says, play it again, and I oblige.

Then S.G. released Satellite, which stirred me even more. I’ve been anticipating this album for a while. So, as a fan, I randomly wrote S.G. here on Substack and basically said: Hey, if you ever want a video, I have some footage.

I didn’t expect to hear back. It was a random action on a slow day—just an obscure, strange, not-so-well-crafted message. But somehow, it landed in the hands of S.G.’s wonderful manager, Jay Steele. I spent the next week bringing this video to life with the guidance of S.G. and Jay.

The footage I originally had in mind—the flawed film I had shared with my friends—was what I thought might become the concept for the music video.

That was the first idea.

But once I heard the album tracks, I realized it wasn’t quite right. We explored other options before landing on this: kids dancing around a fire.

What we found in the archive

While making King Coal, we did a lot of test shoots—just playing around with lenses and visual concepts, not taking anything too seriously. This video was one of those experiments, filmed in the fall of 2020 in Nicholas County, West Virginia, with my cousins’ kids.

We built a fire, dressed the kids in random thrift store costumes, and projected archival footage from West Virginia coal camps—some of which actually made it into the final film. Curren Sheldon shot it, Molly Born produced, and I directed.

Everyone was just having fun, leaning into the randomness of the moment. You might even recognize some of these same kids from the Summer’s End music video we made for John Prine back in 2018.

Giving the archive new context

Making this video meant learning how to let the footage breathe—how to let it settle naturally into the world of the song. I didn’t want to literally translate S.G.’s lyrics, but I did want to find visual and emotional elements that overlapped with the storytelling and the song’s quiet magic.

In the edit, I made a few key moves that ended up guiding the entire process.

The first was deciding that Riley—the young girl on the motorbike—would serve as a kind of hypothetical narrator. The story would open with the lyric: When you're a farm kid in a small town, you drive before the legal age.

Riley would be the one “telling” us this story.

Nevaeh—the girl featured as the video’s thumbnail—would embody LeAnna, as described in the lyrics:
LeAnn, thoughts go back again to LeAnna
Eighteen became a mother
LeAnn, thoughts go back again to LeAnna
Already raised her little brother
…
LeAnn once spent a summer in Paris
Paris, Tennessee
The only Paris LeAnn would ever meet
We talked about it all on a bleacher seat

Visually and narratively, this felt right. I’ve filmed both of Riley and Nevaeh several times over the past decade, and they have very different styles in front of the camera.

Riley plays it cool. Nevaeh is a direct force.

Riley just does her thing, while Nevaeh looks straight into the lens—breaking through that pretend world where people are supposed to ignore the camera.

She’s mouthing at the camera, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? at 1:43 in the music video—questioning the gaze that’s upon her. That intensity felt right for the emotional weight of LeAnna’s character.

Later in the video the archival loop repeats over and over during the refrain:
“Ooo, small town is where my mind gets stuck...”

It’s meant to reflect that cyclical, stuck feeling the lyrics evoke—something felt in both content and rhythm.

yours truly wearing the rabbit mask seen in the music video.

Filmmaking often leads you down unexpected rabbit holes—and this one came complete with a literal rabbit mask (no idea where that idea came from). But I’m glad this footage resurfaced and found its way into Snapping Turtle.

As filmmakers, it’s easy to see the footage that doesn’t make the cut as a kind of failure—“killing our darlings,” as they say—but sometimes those darlings get resurrected.

Keep filming and keep your files organized - you never know what might crawl back out of the archive and catch fire one day.

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Soak up the magic of

S.G. Goodman

’s Snapping Turtle and read the behind the scenes on the song’s lyrics here.