Last Sunday, August 1, a Bristol resident hopped on the band Guster's official fan forum to announce a "Guster video being shot in Bristol VT right now."

The alt-rock quartet wasn't at the one-day shoot for the video for the song "Do What You Want" from upcoming album Easy Wonderful (to be released October 5.) But it was still a pretty colorful affair.

That's because the crew spent part of "one very long day" filming local actor Ben Wiggins being pelted by paint balloons, says director of photography Georgia Pantazopoulos. "He's in this crisp white suit that by the end of this video is saturated in these crazy paint-balloon colors."

Because the crew had only one white suit, they had to do the whole thing in a single take with as many cameras as possible. "The pressure was on," Pantazopoulos says. "My camera got pelted by a massive big paint balloon."

The video's director was Mark Palansky (below at far right) a Hollywood dude who helmed Penelope (with Christina Ricci) and has been tapped to direct a big action movie called Iron Jack. The rest of the crew was local, including the producer, Burlington College student Heather Beliveau. She's an intern at the Vermont Film Commission, which helped Palansky set up the shoot from L.A.

Palansky "came to town the day before we started shooting," says Pantazopoulos, and "we walked through the locations together. He was telling me how amazing Vermont was" -- but wondered why the state has no tax incentive for film production, adds Pantazopoulos. (Rejected by the legislature in 2009, that tax incentive is something of a cause célèbre for many local film pros.)

Unlike a full-scale movie shoot, the video didn't have much of an economic footprint: "This was a no-budget thing," Pantazopoulos says. "Everybody was just giving their time and effort. There were a lot of genuinely nice people that just let us borrow things for the shoot, which generally never happens."

Pantazopoulos (at left) is a grad of Burlington College's film program who went on to work on films such as Shutter Island, Edge of Darkness and upcoming The Town. She goes "back and forth between here and Boston" and is starting a business with UVM grad Ashton Harrewyn; they're currently in preproduction of a video for Connecticut hip-hop artist Big Stat.

Also at the shoot were Harrewyn (third photo down, far left) and Ferrisburgh documentarian and Steadicam operator Finn Yarbrough (center with camera).

Thanks to Pantazopoulos for these images. Assuming the Bristol footage (and additional footage from a shoot the previous day in Colchester) ends up in the vid, we'll post a link once it's live.