From its eccentric characters to the booty-shaking beat, Sugar High Gang's "Team Spandex" music video is a lot of fun.
The video, which was put up on YouTube on July 19, was shot in Winston-Salem, where the band is from.
"We've been performing since November 2008," said Shanthony Exum, a graphic designer and half of the dance-music duo. She and Mike Shepherd, an educator who works with kids with developmental disabilities and is a math tutor, met at a friend's housewarming party back in 2007.
"I took a liking to Shanthony pretty much instantly," said Shepherd. "But we didn't get together then. We kept missing each other; then we found each other on MySpace back at the time when it was still a relevant force. We clicked, and we've been together ever since."
They began dating and, inspired by their mutual love of music, formed their band about two months after they got together.
The name of the band is a play on Sugarhill Gang, a pioneering hip-hop group best known for the song "Rapper's Delight."
Shepherd said he wasn't quite sure how he and Exum settled on Sugar High Gang as the name of their duo.
"It happened so quickly," he said. "I know Shanthony and I were talking about writing a song about having a sugar high, and that made me think of the Sugarhill Gang. Instead of a song, it became our name…. It's an homage and a really obvious joke we hope everyone gets."
They perform at various venues with music that Exum describes as "dance music or electro-pop. It has a strong electronic beat, but also it's rap music."
They have performed around the state. "Team Spandex" is their first music video.
"We were approached by this guy, Sal Caino, who came out of the School of the Arts," Shepherd said. "Basically, he really liked our music and offered to do this pro bono to build up his music video portfolio. He came up with the whole concept and script and the locations."
Salvatore Caino is a 2008 graduate of the UNC School of the Arts' School of Filmmaking. After graduation, he moved to Los Angeles for a year before returning to Winston-Salem, where he grew up.
"Basically, I'm a fan of theirs, and I'm really into local music and whatnot," Caino said. "I told them, I want to do something that's fun and that will fit the style of your music, and introduce you as a band to people who have never heard your music before.
"I started talking to them, and we had an idea. I made an outline, and we went over it and used all the resources we could find…. It was pretty easy to do in a place where you'd grown up."
Much of the video was shot poolside at the home of friends of Caino off Robinhood Road, and the opening sequence -- a 90-second skit in which Exum and Shepherd meet some odd tailors in a woodland setting -- was shot in another friends' backyard off Peace Haven Road.
"The extras were kind of mutual friends," Shepherd said. They include Saylor Breckenridge, a sociology professor at Wake Forest University who plays the inventor of a magical pair of spandex pants.
"He brought (the role) to a kind of life I don't think anyone else could have," Shepherd said.
They shot the video in May, and Caino spent part of June editing it.
He is also working on a documentary about the Piedmont Triad Research Park, a commercial and another music video.
"I want to build up my portfolio as much as I can before moving to New York, which is my goal," Caino said.
The video for "Team Spandex" went up last week, and within the first three days had more than 1,000 views. That number continues to climb.
"It's been overwhelmingly positive," Shepherd said. "People tell me they've been posting it and reposting it on Facebook, and we've even heard from a guy in England. That's the way the Internet works. You put something on, and it goes everywhere very quickly."
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