What happens when the interviewer and the guest are the same person?
James Dean Welles—already familiar to Here TV audiences from Threesome, and also known as Clark Westfield, frontman of indie-rock band The Gay Blades—joins The Deal for a somewhat unconventional interview: a conversation with himself.
Playing both sides of the exchange, Welles asks and answers a series of questions about his life and music, turning a standard artist interview into a playful exercise in performance, split-screen television and rock-and-roll personality.
Because James was already a familiar personality to Here TV viewers—and had another creative identity as musician Clark Westfield—I wanted to do something more entertaining than simply sit him down for another conventional interview.
The solution was deliberately simple: have James interview himself.
We developed a series of questions and shot him performing both sides of the conversation, moving between interview chairs and changing wardrobe to distinguish the two versions of himself.
The segment was captured with a multicamera setup, but the illusion was ultimately created in the edit. Using carefully matched performances, timing, split-screen compositing and some deliberately old-school visual effects, I constructed the footage into a seamless back-and-forth conversation between James and his alter ego.
It was a small production built around a strong visual joke—taking the familiar musician interview format and using editing and performance to turn it into something unexpected.