VIDEO: Dear Leaders - Myth (Not A Football Song)

Here's my first venture into music videos - made for a friend's band - Dear Leaders. It was actually shot last year, but a busy work schedule delayed the edit until the beginning of this year - they released the track as a single in April alongside the video - check it out below!

https://vimeo.com/159264392

It was real guerrilla film making, we had no budget, very little plan or script - just a very rough narrative. We shot this across London, near Green Lanes in Haringey and also in Hackney Marshes, with a lot of improvisation at the locations. I also shot this solo, with only two days to get everything done (the band live in separate cities) - which added extra pressure to the production!

The edit was quite challenging as a result, but eventually I picked a route through the footage, not that the narrative makes total sense... but when were music videos ever the bastion of linear narratives?

I was lucky enough to work with actor Julian Spooner (who put up with two days of masking tape being ripped off his face) - who was great to work with, mainly because he was very patient and took my direction without protest. The band members also make small cameos - see if you can spot them!

It was shot mostly on my Sony A7s and it's low light capabilities allowed opened up a lot of creative possibilities for shooting at dusk on the marshes.

Audio: The Sound in Silence, the Silence in sound

The space between silence and noise

Last year, as part of an AHRC funded project, I was commissioned to make a short experimental audio documentary on the subject of silence. I was given freedom as to how I explored this subject and so I set out to capture the thoughts of those who worked with sound and in silent spaces.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/146717849" params="color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]

Click here to download it.

The result, unsurprisingly, was that silence meant lots of different things to different people and so thematically it was very noisy! This relationship between noise and silence was one I was keen to explore through the production and so the piece is filled with hiss, distortion and feedback in an attempt to echo the noisy subject matter. This was explored further through the use of interviews but also with extracts of the poem 'Describing Silence' which are intercut throughout. This piece written by James Wilkes was a response to his time spent in total silence and explores some of the self generated noise born out of silence.

The audio work was an artistic output for an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project exploring the role of silence in academia and other professional fields. The project was run by the Science Communication Centre at Imperial College London and the piece was featured at one of their events.

Production Notes

• The piece features interviews with Sophie Scott (cognitive neuroscientist), James Wilkes (poet and writer), Sara Mohr-Pietsch (BBC Radio 3 presenter), Cheryl Tipp (Natural Sounds Curator, British Library) and Vidyadaka (London Buddhist Centre).
• The idea of distortion and noise influenced the production from the early stages and as work continued I really wanted to create an intense build up of noise that would level off and really help mark the silence experienced later on in the anechoic chamber.
• The piece written by James Wilkes 'Describing Silence' - can be heard in full below: [soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/79756417" params="color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]
• The interview and reading from James was recorded in an anechoic chamber based at UCL. The space itself is very strange to stand in, the best comparison I can think of is what happens to your hearing when you travel in a pressurised aeroplane. In terms of recording audio in there, it was actually a pretty boring space to record in!
• Although it did crop up in several interviews I was keen to avoid referencing John Cage's 4:33 - there are some great pieces on this already (particularly here: http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/library/1258-john-cage-and-the-question-of-genre) and it justifies a much longer discussion than I could have accommodated for it.
• The piece was recorded on a Zoom H4n and a Marantz PMD661 with AKG D230 dynamic microphone. It was edited and composed in Ableton Live.