Inside the Making of ‘Sea Lion Cow’

Ivan Cash knew it was a mad idea: Conceiving, planning, and shooting a music video in 24 hours, especially after the director and his crew had spent the last five days on a grueling commercial shoot in New York City. They’d gone into overtime every day, including the last, a Friday in July 2023, leaving them unable to return all the rental gear until the following Monday. As nuts as an impromptu music video might be, Cash knew it was just as mad to let $100,000 worth of high-end camera equipment sit in a box truck for a whole weekend. 

“My wife told me I was deranged, but gave her blessing,” Cash tells Rolling Stone. “And then the key crew members were also like, ‘Cool, we’re down to do something.’ The next person I called was Gideon.”

Gideon Irving — a musician, performer, and self-styled “globetrotting house showman” who’s played living rooms and theaters around the world, making a career out of the unexpected — was all in. Irving and Cash had met at one of Irving’s signature house shows in Santa Fe, then became neighbors during the pandemic when Cash and his wife moved to upstate New York. They each say they were “smitten” with the other, vibing on the same artistic wavelength and tossing ideas back and forth, but this would be their first formal collaboration. 

Irving started looking through his catalog for the perfect song for the video, and the one that jumped out was called “Sea Lion Cow.” Though released in 2019, it was a song Irving had been sitting with, and loving, for years, one originally “written” — or, more technically, created on the spot — by a four-year-old named Bella Fratkin, and recorded by her father. 

The resulting short film, Sea Lion Cow, is the epitome of a passion project. Shot in the middle of the night on the G train, a subway line that runs between south Brooklyn and Queens, it turns a late-night train ride into a mini odyssey. In one take, Irving walks through the train car, bellowing Fratkin’s song, the childlike whimsy and wisdom of her words resonating with some fantastical and meditative visual flourishes that just aren’t worth spoiling with words. (At least at this juncture — they’ll be discussed below, but seriously, just watch it first.) 

Though just six minutes, Sea Lion Cow embraces a kind of slow burn that Irving notes is antithetical to “the way algorithms and the streaming industry” encourage artists “to front-load anything you make with zazz and wow.” He continues: “I think we really lose out when we have such low expectations of our audience that they can’t just hang around for a minute, that something might pay off at the end. You might get the twinkle at the very last second.”

GROWING UP, FRATKIN used singing to express how she was feeling, organize the thoughts swirling in her brain, make sense of them, and get them out in the world. She often did this in the backseat of her dad’s Volkswagen bug on her way to preschool. Fratkin, now 19 and a freshman in college, quips that whenever her dad “felt like a banger was coming,” he’d grab his phone and hit record. 

That’s how he captured “Sea Lion Cow” one day, and it quickly became a favorite. He’d play it for any and everyone, including, one day in 2013, Irving, when the musician played a show in the geodesic dome the Fratkins had built in the backyard of their home in Humboldt County, California. 

“Sea Lion Cow” stuck with Irving. For years, he used it as his alarm clock sound. He started performing it live and eventually cut a version with collaborator Dave Harrington (part of the celebrated electronic duo Darkside with Nicholas Jaar) for his 2019 album, Glitterbones Bargain. All along the way, he was sure to properly license the work from its original writer, Fratkin. 

Fratkin admits she sometimes found peoples’ fascination with “Sea Lion Cow” a little peculiar — “It’s barely even a song. It’s like an audio journal to me,” she says with a laugh. “But I also feel very seen by the fact that so many people have seen something in just a vulnerable, random word vomit from my childhood; have seen something that’s really special and speaks, maybe, to something kids can see in the world that maybe adults can’t as much.” 

Cash seems to echo this latter sentiment when he explains why he and his crew were so game to make the “Sea Lion Cow” video in such a short period of time, and immediately on the heels of their exhausting commercial shoot. “There’s some part of me that believes in the magic of creativity, and as much as I’ve got to pay the bills like everyone, that’s not why I’m doing what I’m doing at all,” he says. “The part that got me into it, and that keeps me in it, is the artist part. So, to have the resources from the commercial project felt like a window was open for a very short period of time. And even though it was, in my wife’s words, ‘deranged’ to plan a shoot in at 3 a.m. and bring everyone along, it just felt like, to not do that would be like letting capitalism win out. And I want to live in a world where there’s more magic, wonder, art, creativity, and what-ifs.”

THE CONCEPT FOR the video came together quickly. Cash had long had an image in his head of a bunch of plants on the subway, so they came up with the idea to have Irving walk through a subway car, holding a small plant, which he then places amongst a lush little garden. (A plant was also the perfect place to hide the microphone Irving would be singing into.) As one might expect, shooting on the subway is often an expensive proposition when done by the books with the proper permits. “Or,” Irving quips, “free if you take our approach” — which was the more DIY, guerrilla one.

So, the night of the shoot, the crew pulled up to the southernmost stop on the G train, Church Ave., with a whole lot of gear and plants — and immediately got into a traffic accident when their truck ripped off the front bumper of a car while parking. 

“It was an honest mistake, a blind spot — right off the bat, we thought that was the end of our shoot,” Irving recalls with a laugh. But luckily, the owner of the car, who came running out of the corner deli nearby, was content to accept a wad of cash, rather than getting the cops involved. 

Another obstacle appeared soon after, when they prepared to haul everything down into the subway station and encountered a “giant puddle of piss in the elevator,” Irving says. Cleaning material retrieved from the store helped solve that problem, and just after midnight, the 12-person crew boarded the train. As the train started its journey north, the crew began to set up the plants and sort the lighting. Eventually, Cash and Irving started filming, with the first two takes effectively serving as a rehearsal. They completed the third take right as the G was returning to Church Ave., at around 2:45 a.m. They were preparing to do one more when an MTA employee told them the train was going out of commission for the night. 

At that point, a flummoxed New Yorker poked his head into the car and remarked, “A botanical garden on the fucking G train! … How dare you! But, why wouldn’t you?” 

That man, shown at the end of the film, is one of just a few actual riders on the train that night. The other folks Irving sings for were members of the film’s crew, given the simple instruction, “Act like you’re a New Yorker.” Cash notes that one crew member fell asleep, not because she was told to, but because it was almost 3 a.m. and she was exhausted. 

The final touch of magic for Sea Lion Cow came in postproduction — a little animated creature that emerges from the garden and drifts around the train car. Irving and Cash credit the idea to Fratkin, whom they were eager to bring into the process after using her song. Fratkin remembers telling Irving about the various “creatures” that were a part of her life growing up amongst the redwood forests in Northern California.

“I was telling him, Bigfoot is a big thing — people are always talking about Bigfoot sightings, and I looked over and I had a little Bigfoot stuffed animal,” Fratkin says. “That was the inspiration for it.”

Sea Lion Cow, which was recently acquired by Rolling Stone Films, with Gus Wenner, Jason Fine, Sean Woods, and Alex Dale serving as executive producers, premiered last year at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was not the kind of debut Cash and Irving had envisioned for the project, certainly not when they boarded the G train that night with a ton of gear, a vague plan, and a whole lot of creative determination. But that, as Cash says, just makes for another “fun, meta layer.”

“I think the song and the film are a great example of getting out of the way,” he says. “We can take credit for this, but also we shouldn’t get too much credit for this, because, in a way, a kid is just singing out loud, and we’re experimenting in the subway.” 

Sea Lion Cow credits:

Director: Ivan Cash
Featuring: Gideon Irving
Producer: Maggie Roberts
Executive Producers: Gus Wenner, Jason Fine, Sean Woods, Alexandra Dale, Ivan Cash, Gideon Irving
Production Company: Cash Studios, Rolling Stone Films
Song By: Bella Fratkin