The three lively youngsters—Chanci Nixon, Terrell Reese and Kenneth Wiggins— are led by Ian Powell, an aspiring actor who studies at the Boston Arts Academy. Since League member Nicholas Barnes is MIA with his dance troupe Expressions, Ian has to pick up the slack and think of some moves for the kids to pull during their seven-second cameo.

“Can you do the worm?” he asks Kenneth, who, along with his two sidekicks, wears a silver whistle around his neck under an Ecko Unlimited jumpsuit that he’ll get to take home at the end of the night.

“After the video, it’s all you can eat,” says Aaron S. Byrd ’05, the self-proclaimed gopher to Ardrey on Saturday night’s set.

“Candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy!” shouts Kenneth before showing off an impeccable worm step followed by a stutter legged “tick move.”

After Ian, who is significantly older, Kenneth is the clear leader of the bunch, bantering with his mother and shooting jovial instructions at his fellow B2K-ers.

“Can someone turn the beat back on?” he calls, and five minutes later, “Stop Stop” comes on and the four boys try out their routine, bouncing their shoulders back and forth as they emerge from behind a cereal shelf.

Richard Sabonjin, owner of Broadway Market, watches and listens by the front door, which in mere hours has transformed his grocery into a teeming hip hop powerhouse.

“I think this is a great endeavor,” he says. “The guys have got a real passion for it. You can see it in their faces, you can see it in their eyes.”

Origins and Goals

The idea to make the music video came from Ardrey and Joshua Clark, one of the directors, who met each other last summer interning at Ridley Scott Associates in Los Angeles.

“We sort of became friends and hung out all summer, and I came back to New York and he came back to Boston,” says Clark. “We kept in contact, and I told him we were thinking of shooting this video. We got a demo reel, and we looked at all these different kinds of bands, and we never really found anything we liked.”

“I listened to months and months of cheesy indie rock music, because Josh wanted to do an indie rock video, because that’s what was in New York,” says Ardrey. “I sent him one of Nick’s solo songs, and he loved it. But I wanted to bring everybody along as opposed to just Nick.”

Clark and Aaron Weber, both currently enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in New York, came up to Cambridge a few weeks later to meet with Tha League and hear them play.

Ardrey hooked up with a producer from Black Dog Films, the music video division of Ridley Scott, who has been an informal advisor to the team since the beginning of the process. Clark and Weber hope to use their MTV connections at the School of Visual Arts to secure airtime for the final product.

Deleon, who produced “Stop Stop” using professional editing and drum software, says that the past year has gotten him more excited about being an artist rather than a producer. Writing the treatment for the video’s script and acting in it, he says, made him realize that he could be successful at both.