Andre Hyland

The first night Billy Graham did a stadium service in Cincinnati, Andre Hyland wasn't allowed inside because he keep screaming, "Billy Graham taught him how to read!"
But he got in the second night.







So when did you get started making videos? Was it just a natural thing that you grew up with that evolved over time? Or was there a moment that everything just clicked and you thought, this is something I can have fun with?

I was home schooled from 4th through 7th grade, and during that time my older brother and I started playing with our family video camera, it was like spring 1990, and we got the camera during the 88 Christmas. We just pulled it out of the closet one day and started making videos, I cant remember what prompted the urge to play with the camera, but we busted it out, and began making a series of "movies" titled "Batman & Ruben", it was a spoof of Batman and Robin, my older brother played Batman, and I played Ruben (Ruben was a really fat robin with barf all over his shirt. I would just stuff my shirt with a big pillow and wipe a bunch of nasty crap from the fridge all over my shirt to soil it and make it look like barf. Then the duo would go on adventures, for each movie. We didn’t have a tri-pod, so we would always stack 4 milk crates on each other to hold the camera for most of the shots. 

Leon (Leon Reid) was in a lot of the videos from back then too....My brother and I would also make short animations with a variety of toys. So I started to make a bunch of "epic" animations with my GI Joes.  But basically, it was between the ages of 10 and 12 that I really got into making movies, and I’ve just had a passion for it ever since that period. All through middle school and High school, I would always have a video camera with me.

Then, during High school, I would always have a video camera, a sketch book and a VHS compilation of my videos with me. I would always try to show my videos at parties or at someone’s house wherever we ended up hanging out, in order to show my work.

So what were your influences in video then? Was there something that was blowing you away in TV or film and made you think "I want to do that" or "Shit, I can do that." When did that click?

When I was younger, like 10. When I first started playing making little videos, Saturday Night Live was a huge influence, because I always wanted to make comedies. I also loved Ghost Busters and that old mini series about the Lizard Aliens called "V". But I guess most kids like TV and movies, but SNL was a real driving force for me when I was little. But as time went by I opened up to more things....just movies in general, I didn’t really have "favorite directors" until late in High school, but I used to really like Dan Aykroyd when I was little.  Kids in the Hall was also a good influence, from like 7th grade through the end of high school, i always used to have a tape in the VCR, ready to tape any weird shit I could find on TV

Yep. I would just start taping on a 6hour tape and get all of my channel surfing on tape. Everything my eye saw, I had preserved. It’s like I had my entire teenage years exposure to television recorded. I totally know the feeling.

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Another BIG, BIG influence was watching Cable access TV, I always loved watching that, and I still do. Also low budget local car commercials and crap like that, I have always loved spoofing that stuff forever.

Those tapes are like an archive of my teenage TV watching experience. I didn’t have cable at my house through much of my life, so when my family would go on vacation during High school, I would bring a VCR with me and a few blank tapes, so I could tape Cable TV off the TV from the houses or hotels would stay in (no joke), I would do the same thing when I would go to a friends place too, I would always have a tape to record with.

Its so different now with Youtube.com, you can pretty much see whatever you want and whenever you want at this point, which is awesome, but it also kills so much mystique of thrift store tapes and random shit you would record off of TV at 3am Etc.

Yeah, I was at a gun show yesterday, which I was physically removed from by-the-by, and I saw all these crazy bootleg tapes of bizarre survival techniques for people who, in any state other than Florida, would be considered homeless. And instead of buying them in a heartbeat, as I would have years ago, I just wrote down the names to look up online later. The landscape has changed drastically with youtube.com. What kind of things are you blown away by now?

I'm the same way; I don't buy as much weird video stuff anymore, unless it really looks amazing. What blows my mind now? The internet just blows my mind all together. I watch Youtube.com just as much, if not more now than TV.

I know. It’s worth the 1.64 billion that Google paid for it. A bargain at twice the price. Not to switch gears too suddenly, but when you work on a project, is it usually one at a time, "set it up and knock it down" or do you work on a lot of projects at once? And if so, how many projects are you working on right now?

For video projects, I’m normally working on 1 to 3 at a time, they can be at any stage, like editing one, shooting another, Etc... Projects in General, probably like 4-6 different projects at a time, I haven’t been painting as much lately, but many times I will be working on videos, writing songs, promoting shit, figuring out how to promote better, performing, writing ideas, its all sort of constant. It’s hard to keep track. But in general, I have my bLoNd cHiLi short videos, my street art, my graffiti documentary "Nobodys", my band (Tracy, Dean, & Jesus) which is a spoof church band, but it’s also a multi media project. For each live show we build a big cardboard devil and demons. “Tracy, Dean, & Jesus” was also a Cable access show for about 3 years when I used to live in Cincinnati.

Damn. That’s a pretty full work load.

We would shoot an episode, then I would submit it to the Cable access channel, and I would have it played on the Religious channel, so viewers would assume it was a real church show. We would get emails praising us and hating us...it was pretty awesome.

You got in on the religious channel? It made it all the way to air?

Yep, all the time. The videos looked legit, I mean they were goofy...but still in a realistic way.

That must have felt that great to completely have made it inside the fortress of legitimacy.

Yea it was crazy... Like, for one episode we went to a Billy Graham mission stadium service in character, and we all got "saved" on the Cincinnati Bengal’s field by Billy Graham himself. It was pretty funny and weird experience. We had to go two nights in a row, because the first night I was yelling at someone saying "Billy Graham taught him how to read", then security didn’t let us in the stadium, but we got in the second night.

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A lot of your films feel incredibly genuine. Like real access to a lunatic, in a weird encapsulated moment. They have characters that are so realistically bat-shit crazy that a lot of the times I'm laughing; it's because of how disturbing they are.

More than any thing else I've seen lately, you really seem to nail "crazy" in the clinical sense. Not even lampooning them really, but just presenting them to the point that it's almost a hyper realistic depiction of a shell shocked Vet, or a guy that's off his meds, dealing with day to day trivialities. Or impacting a normal person’s day to day, like a walking train wreck attaching themselves to someone in the middle of a quickie-mart.

Yea, a lot of my characters are based off of people that I experience on the day to day, like a dude asking me for change near a 7-11 or a mom shopping with her daughter, just random shit. But with the crazy people, I always try to pay close attention the gear they wear, and the subtle things they say. I think when a lot of people try to portray crazy people, they try to make them zany or totally nuts, like every crazy person is a psycho killer constantly laughing or something stupid like that. 

Yeah, you definitely skirt that bullshit. How do you come up with a character? Are they caricatures of real people or do you just come up with these lunatics on the fly?

Where do I come up with characters-...everything comes from somewhere I guess....but for instance I will hear some random person say something in line at the gas station, and I will laugh to myself about whatever they said, then I will remember what they said, then after enough moments of random people watching and listening, I will sort of begin to perform a sample compilation of things I heard and saw, then fill the gaps with my own imagination, and typically a pretty good character will come out of it. 

Do you usually keep the characters on your roster, like reoccurring characters in different shorts?

Many times characters will re-occur, like my Tracy character, but like I said, Tracy, Dean, And Jesus is a pretty constant multi media affair, so I use that character a lot.

Tell me about "movin’ moms" and where that came from. That’s my favorite right now.

Movin Moms- About six years ago I wanted to make a movie with soccer moms, but at the time I didn’t think I had the right ingredients to pull it off.  But my friend/roommate/collaborator on many projects, Mike Mayfield and I wanted to make a video for this monthly video show in New York called Channel 102. So I came up with the idea to have these mom characters fight a Ninja. You know, putting some mundane mom chatter in front of a ridiculous situation. Mike and I put our costumes togeather, and Movin' Moms was born.

I had created a rough outline of how the story would go, but 90 percent of the script was improvised, just chatting it up as the moms, and letting it unfold. (And for the graffiti fan readers, MERZ played the Ninja that battled Konnie & Bev).

Do you usually work that way?

It’s always nerve wracking, but its fun just to create the story as I shoot it, instant gratification, ya know? After Moms screened in NYC at Channel 102, the audience voted it back for another episode. So the next short also included my other roommate/friend/often collaborator, Paul Erling Oyen. He played Deb. Many times at our house, we will just start talking to each other in character, like soccer moms or whatever, just for our own amusement (and practice sort of) .

Shortly after the second episode of Movin Moms played at Channel 102, I came into contact with Fuel TV (it's a fox cable network, that concentrates on eXtreme sports) about trying to create comedy segments for there show called "the Daily Habit". The fellas at Fuel really took a liking to the Movin Moms when I showed them the bLoNd cHiLi reel. So Mike, Paul and I were hired.

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That’s fantastic.

They hired us to basically play our Movin Mom characters in a word on the street segment titled "What’s Hot with Konnie & Bev" (I’m Konnie). We walked around Hermosa Beach, CA asking people what’s "in" this summer, then responding to there answers with raunchy, weird and snooty soccer mom comments. It was pretty cool. It just aired last month; we are supposed to shoot more with Fuel TV in the next few months. So I'm looking forward to that.

So do you think you'll wait until you have a request for new stuff, like the Fuel segment, or do you have plans to keep making whatever you want and when something comes along you'll change gears and jump on that?

Pretty much keep working on my own stuff as much as I can, regardless of what it’s for. When TV opportunities come along, that takes priority at the moment, it’s a much bigger audience, money, etc. But if I’m not working on a video or any creative project, I become seriously anxious and depressed. So I will always be producing new work as long, and as much, as I can.

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So what are you working on at the moment? Or is the Fuel thing that’s coming up taking up the

No, right now, I’m putting a lot of energy into the “Tracy, Dean, & Jesus” project. We are starting to play around LA a lot more as the band now, so I’m trying to come up with new ideas for that, trying to book shows, etc. But when I went back home to Cincinnati this summer I shot a video that I’m really excited about. I'm currently editing it at the moment.

There is this 62ft Jesus statue off the side of I-75 between Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio with a man made lake in front of.

That’s a big damn Jesus.

Yeah. It’s all part of this place called Solid Rock Church....but anyway, I went out there as my Minister Tracy Character and shot a video. I bought a little one person boat and rowed it across the Jesus Lake, up to the big statue carrying a candle (The Eternal flame of Tracy) to the lap of the Jesus Statue. Then I went swimming in the lake. It’s also the first thing I got naked for. It’s gonna be pretty funny.

I'm also adding a few new segments to my graffiti documentary "Nobodys" before I start playing festivals with it. I've already shown it at a handful of public screenings in Los Angeles, and also in Alabama for the Red Bull Writers Block.

Are there any ideas that you've had and either haven’t had the resources or time or balls to do yet? Be as vague as you like, or feel free to just say no.

Mike Mayfield and myself just finished a feature length script for the “Tracy, Dean, And Jesus” movie. So we need some serious funding to get that made. So that’s a big venture. I also would love to run onto a major league baseball field dressed as some sort of character during a game, that’s always sort of been a dream of mine...but I wish I had done it when I was teenager...you can do serious time for that shit.

Yeah, they take that shit pretty seriously, for some reason. The fans love it. As a side note, does your band have any songs recorded?

Not really, well one, but we have a bunch of videos of our music...we are a really good band to see live. But we are going to record some songs soon. We are actually building a practice space/studio in our garage at the moment (another freaking big project, but it’s almost ready actually) But, we do sell, and give away DVDs instead of CD's at our shows

Do you have any plans to tour? Any thoughts of bringing the band to NYC?

I would love to play NYC, no tour plans set in stone at the moment. But if I could set up a show in NYC around Christmas time with a few good bands that draw crowds, I would be down for sure.

As a final question; tell me a quick story about a time that you thought you were going to be killed or a time that you pulled off some shit you'd love at least one more person to know about. It's random I know, but we we're all fuck ups at one point or another and everyone's got this story. Let's hear it.

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The Jimmy Kimmel Video was kind of like that, when I performed a “saving” on him, but I have it documented, so people can watch that story on video.

When I was 14 at church camp with my older brother Adam, We were staying in this dorm building, and we were trying to sneak out with out our youth group leader finding out, so we actually made one of those ropes out of our bed sheets like they do in old movies, so the plan was to climb down two stories on to the roof below and get away through a stairwell window that was open. But just as I climbed out the window, and I was hanging on the edge, my youth group leader dude came in to our room all of a sudden, so I just let go and fell two stories onto the roof below. And my brother just tossed the rest of the sheets on my empty bed, and told our youth group leader I was asleep, and he bought it, and magically, I did not get hurt jumping out the window. It was pretty cool. I actually have a bunch of stories but that was the first that came to mind.

Also, I keep mentioning Tracy, Dean, And Jesus, and church camp etc....but I’m not really religious at all, in case anyone was wondering.

Alright man, I think I’ve got enough to make this pretty damn good. Anything you want to throw in for good measure?

The documentary, Nobodys, watch for it when it hits the festivals. Keep your eyes peeled for Tracy, Dean, and Jesus. Check www.bLoNdcHiLi.com regularly. I made a video called "Crackers" with Mark, The Cobra Snake recently. That should be on the innerweb in the next few months. Look for the Bengals going to the Super Bowl this year. Odd Nosdam (Anticon Records) just released a new album titled “Vol. 8”. It’s a CD-ROM album that includes a music video I did for the song “Absolut Alive”.

Oh, and keep your eyes peeled for Buddy Lembek pieces on the streets.

Websites

www.BlondChiLi.com
www.TracyDeanAndJesus.com
www.myspace.com/TracyDeanAndJesus