The band is called Shoot the Moon — think the Darkness without the wink. The song is the proletarian ode “It’s All Good,” and it sounds sorta like Collective Soul reinterpreting Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend.” Thirty-two of us have offered to be extras in the Devilfish Films video for this single, shot on a late Sunday afternoon in a 2400-square-foot Canton studio, and our sole mission is simple: “Lots of fist-pumping.”

So instructs director Lawrence Sampson from a faux-club stage that he and his volunteer crew fabricated in a day. “We’re kind of playing it over the top a little bit,” he admits, after summoning a gangly kid with Smurf tattoos and a “nice” pink Mohawk to the front row.

“It’s All Good” draws from the lighter side of MTV’s late-’80s Headbangers Ball: Shoot the Moon toil away in a basement practice space until the cellar walls magically disappear, leading them onto a club stage before a packed house (that’s us fist-pumpers). All the while, frontman Sam Jodrey — Sampson’s lanky high-school friend who also drums for the local DIY hardcore band Toxic Narcotic — narrates the transformation with feel-good rock clichés like “You gotta work all week/And it’s such a drag” to “So tonight’s your night/We’re gonna show you a good time.” Work may break you, but rock will redeem you.

Sampson, a boyish 33-year-old with a slight resemblance to Jay Mohr, knows about art’s redemptive powers. Growing up in a blue-collar Newton neighborhood the youngest of six, the effusive artist spent his childhood scribbling pictures. “I ate ice cream and watched TV and drew pictures,” he says. “That’s all I did as a kid.” He expected to be a manual laborer, but at 15 the illustrator came up with the idea of selling caricatures on Cape Cod and landed a cart spot on Main Street in Hyannis, working for a guy who let him take home 20 percent of his sales. “At night, it was like the drunk crowd, the vacation crowd,” Sampson recalls at a post-shoot wrap party in his Waltham loft (a sign on his apartment door: BEWARE OF ATTACK ARTIST). “Because I looked like I was 10, I gathered this audience. The third night I did it, I came home with $300 cash. And my parents were like, ‘Oh — art’s okay.’”

After high school, Sampson spent a year at MassArt, but classes weren’t really his thing. So without any fancy degrees, he’s spent the past decade earning a living as a commercial artist. He’s sculpted life-size props (gargoyles, Buddha, crypts) for elaborately themed events. (“But then after a couple years, I realized, ‘I make party props for overprivileged kids in Wellesley.’ Okay, next.”) He’s made vehicular sculptures, like a VW bug morphed into a fiberglass-and-steel tortoise for Turtle Transit and a Land Rover molded into the Monster.com mascot. For Aerosmith’s Just Press Play tour, he co-constructed an enormous chrome hand that reached up from the stage’s lip every night. “That was one of my dreams realized,” admits Sampson, a childhood Aerosmith fan.

ADVERTISEMENT

In the past couple years, he’s leaned toward filmmaking. His prop-construction experience got him jobs making the backdrop for the Explosion’s Axis-filmed video “Here I Am,” plus designing and fabricating sets (a brothel, a trailer hideout, a bloodied crime-scene bathroom) on Robert Patton-Spruill’s locally filmed action-adventure flick Turntable. “In Hollywood, [set design is] like being a plumber, but around here it’s a big deal.”

Last spring, he starred in Benjamin Oliver’s " Life After Leukemia ," a short film shot during the 48-Hour Film Project. In his first-and-only acting role, Sampson played a former child star turned gutter-sleeping bum. For the part, he wet himself on camera. “I wasn’t playing somebody so far from myself,” he says, laughing at the fact he won Best Actor out of all the Boston submissions. “I’ve always hung out with derelict people. It wasn’t me pretending to be in France in 1920, it was me, like really drunk and uninhibited.”

Sampson decided that as of this January he wanted to be primarily a “film guy.” So after co-founding Devilfish, he plans to dangle the completed Shoot the Moon video in front of investors. Funding or not, he’s still really enamored of the directorial process. “You can sculpt an object. But if you can sculpt an environment, it’s like ‘Whoa, oh my God, look at this.’”

___

On the Web:

Lawrence Sampson: //www.lawrencesampson.com/