A lonely stereo-robot roams the streets of Houston, befriends a street kid, rocks out a house party, swims with babes, and gets mixed up with drugs only to stumble back home in pieces. This is the tale in an unofficial music video for LCD Soundsystem's “Home” produced by Houston-based Funwunce Productions.

The video has quickly gone viral, winning Vimeo’s “Video of the Week” and gaining publicity on Pitchfork, Spin, and countless blogs. Watch the film and you’ll recognize the light rail, H-Town's downtown skyline and maybe even a few familiar faces.

Take a look at "Home" and all its Houston moments:

I sat down to talk with the film’s director, Rick Darge, and producer, Mark Armes Wednesday night at Fitzgerald’s. Armes led me up the stairs to the green room balcony. We ducked under vine-covered power lines and had a seat.

CultureMap: So how did you guys come up with the concept?

Rick Darge: I, actually ... I heard the track and had an idea of a robot, just, you know, a robot as a main star of a music video and that was kinda like the first idea— it would be a short film. It wouldn’t be a performance video. I talked to Mark about it right away. The initial idea was the rise of ... a robot being built as like a character from Gepetto’s workshop.

Mark Ames: Yeah, the initial idea was a little different.

RD: We started ping-ponging ideas back and forth. I told Mark I wanted to do a video about a robot as the rise and fall of human life, just life experiences. He starts off at the bottom. He rises to the top. Then he returns home. I wanted to shoot it in LA and Mark was like “I got a great idea. We should make it like the rise and fall of a party robot. It’s kind of growing in fame as it works the ranks of the party scene.” And I thought that was an awesome spin on the idea and made it what it is today.

MA: We kind of had the idea to change the robot into a sound system.

RD: That came, yeah, Mark definitely added that complete element. What I like about the robot is that it doesn’t know its place in the world until people recognize that, hey, you are a sound system. You play music. You make people happy. That was a definite collaboration.

CM: The robot as a “sound system” that works into the band’s name quite conveniently …

RD: Yeah, it all just kind of worked. The thing about this video was that it was really just a whim to make it. Mark was the one to suggest we film it in Houston because it would be easy, well, not easy, but easier than it would be to shoot in LA because we wouldn’t have to deal with … well, uh, people in LA are very jaded. There are projects going on all the time and, uh, and to feature the city of Houston was something we were able to get people excited about.

CM: Were you always planning on using the entire song? I know it’s long (Eight minutes).

MA: We talked about that. We talked about trimming it down a little bit, but we figured we’d just do the whole thing.

RD: Yes, we were worried about keeping people’s attention span but from the responses we’ve gotten it seems that everyone has been able to watch it all the way through.

CM: That’s what propels it — the narrative. You want to know what happens to that robot.

RD: Exactly. We wanted them to get attached and fall in love with that robot, relate to the robot. The robot starts out as a thing, an external robotic creature. But as you watch it you become attached to it but then we spin it at the end.

MA: One thing that’s funny about that video is everyone falls in love with that robot, but inside that robot is one of the most notorious bicycle thieves in all of Montrose.

CM: You mean it’s not the cute girl who climbs out of it at the end?

MA: We couldn’t have (Elena Vann) in the robot suit for filming. We couldn’t do that to her. It was heavy; it was hot.

RD: It was June, I mean…

MA: Right, during filming we needed someone we could treat like shit. First we narrowed it down to three small friends that we had.

RD: The costume was small.

MA: Right, so we narrowed it down to three small guys.

RD: Mark, you were almost going to be in the robot suit at one point.

MA: Yeah I was almost going to do it at one point because …

RD: But you were too tall

MA: I wanted to be in the robot suit because I felt like I knew what shots we needed. But out of the three small people we narrowed it down to, I narrowed it down even further by asking, “Who can I treat like shit?” The choice was clear. We call him Weapon X. He’s a little utility knife at the Free Press Houston office. He just comes by and, it’s like, you send him into suicide missions and he always comes out alive.

CM: Any surprises while shooting?

MA: One of the biggest difficulties we ran into in the whole video was the suit. The first day we pretty much figured that maybe, well … there were no rehearsals. The first day of shooting was the first day he put on the suit.

RD: We didn’t test out the costume at all. We literally finished it and started filming.

MA: It was a time crunch.

RD: (laughs) We just hoped it would work.

MA: The first day was the biggest problem. We were trying to shoot in this warehouse with no AC. For the first scene we had Fabian in this robot costume …

CM: Who is the old man in the first scene, by the way?

MA: The old man is my dad. (laughs) Yeah, that’s my dad. But the first day, well, the face of the robot is a Lite-Brite. Fabian had a car battery in a Jansport backpack to power that Lite-Brite.

CM: He wore all this inside the robot suit?

MA: Oh yeah. He had his arms through the arm things, a car battery on his back powering the Lite-Brite

RD: And he couldn’t see at all.

MA: No he couldn’t see at all. We had to scream at him the whole time where to go.

RD: First day was tough.

MA: We ended up taking out the battery and putting up double-A powered Nite Lights and tied the pooper-scooper arm handles together. A lot of stuff was unintentionally life-saving. Tying the pooper-scoopers together made the robot walk at just the right beat.

RD: It wasn’t planned. It just happened out of necessity. I feel like the whole video … we definitely had a vision of what we wanted to do. We felt strongly about that and were focused but some of these things were out of our control and at the end of the day you just kind of have to go with the flow. To me, the best part about making anything is finding things that you never planned but naturally work.

CM: What a lot of Houstonians love about the video is seeing parts of Houston, which is cool because you originally wanted to shoot in LA.

MA: I figured that might help it get viral, too, you know? That so many people were involved in the video (who hadn’t been involved in music videos before) would make it gain popularity fast. I mean, within the first two weeks we’ve had amazing results. We’ve been on Pithcfork, Spin, Blender, I mean, it’s … it’s really taken on a life of its own.

CM: How often do you make something on a whim like this LCD video? Or how often are you approached to make something for someone else?

MA: We’re kind of both from the freelance world. We’re both used to working on other people’s projects. That’s how we met, actually. We were both working on someone else’s project. He was a cameraman and I was an assistant camera person. We just hated our job mutually. We hated it the exact same amount. We bitched and critiqued and finally we forged comradery out of…

CM: Mutual hate?

MA: Yeah, our mutual hate.

CM: I’ve had entire relationships based off of mutual hate.

MA: That’s how it was! We worked on about four videos together. Every time we worked together it was like a quasi-mutiny. The director lost control. So we decided to start working for ourselves.

CM: Rick, you’re credited as the director for “Home.” Do you always direct Funwunce videos or does Mark direct some? What’s your process?

RD: Originally I was the sole director but it became a mutual thing. But in all Mark was doing a lot more producing and I was doing a lot more directing. We plan to co-direct videos in the future. We work well together.

MA: We pick up the slack for each other. He’s great at camera angles. He’s great at continuity. He comes form post-production background, too, so he knows what kind of shots he needs to get. Whereas I’m more into getting it all together and making it happen.

RD: We discovered through the process that we work really well together. We’re going to keep that going. And make more cool stuff, because, you know, it’s a big world and it’s hard to find someone that you really click with on a creative level and a personal level too.

MA: We’re all buddies. We all like each other.

RD: It’s FUNwunce

CM: Any exciting projects going on?

RD: I’ve got a web series I’m working on with an actor in LA. We’re about it release it. It’s called “My Gay Garden.” It’s a, uh, very weird comedy.

MA: We have a lot of music videos lined up. We’re going to shoot a Slim Thug video in a couple of weeks. We also have a lot of rap videos, surprisingly. It’s cross-genre.

RD: We’ve had some artists we can’t talk about right now respond (to the video) that have really blown our minds. It’s like “wait YOU like our video?”

LCD Soundsystem plays at the Verizon Wireless Theater Friday night.