To celebrate the 1 year anniversary of Sarah Blasko’s beautiful album ‘Eternal Return’ and the release of the deluxe digital only version of the album I was asked to make a video for the final track on the record “Without”. It was wonderful working with Sarah again. The animation is one long camera pan of a large single image I made, I think it would make a cool print.
In 2008 I made an animated music video for the song “Persist” by the Melbourne band All India Radio, the animation was based on the story of Topsy the Coney Island elephant electrocuted by Thomas Edison. My sister Marita provided illustrations and Isobel Knowles assisted me with the animating. The first time I watched the animation with an audience (at a music video program during the Melbourne International Film Festival), claps and cheers followed at the end of every video screened, however “Persist” was met silence so awkward I wanted to fall through the floor. Fast forward 7 years…
Last November I was in NYC for the opening of the exhibition “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland 1861 – 2008” at Brookly Museum, “Persist” had been curated in the exhibition, along with works by Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, and Joseph Stella.
The animation was displayed on a screen, on a loop with the original and very graphic film by Thomas Edison “Electrocution of Topsy”, as a key part of the section that told the story of Topsy and her life at Coney Island. It was an honour to be part of the exhibition, and it was also wonderful to meet the curators from The Wadsworth Atheneum who had originally conceived of the exhibition and to hear how they came across my animated tribute to Topsy online.
The exhibition toured nationally showing at The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford CT, San Diego Museum of Art (July 11, 2015 – October 13, 2015) and McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, (May 11, 2016 – September 11 2016).
From April 2017 Persist will be included in an adapted version of the exhibition that over the next five years will travel to venues in underserved communities in the US.
A fully-illustrated, beautiful 304-page catalogue of the exhibition was published by Yale University Press, here is the write-up on my animation from its pages…
Recently, Melbourne band The Orbweavers presented Deep Leads, a night of music and archival film footage of Melbourne at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, three of my animations were also included in the screening.
The Poison Garden music video screened along with two other films I made especially for the performance, one for The Orbweaver’s song Periods Of Light and Rock, and another for their song Radium Girls.
Radium Girls tells the 1917 story of female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint at the United States Radium factory in New Jersey, the animation will be reworked and released as a proper music video some time next year.
I was in New York City at the time of the event so didn’t get to attend the performance and unfortunately there isn’t a lot of footage from the night, but here are some stills from the Radium Girls music video…
Earlier this week my new music video for The Orbweavers premiered on Tone Deaf and was selected as Rage’s “Wild One” music video (formerly Indie Of The Week). This project was a bit of a family affair, my older sister Marita being one half of The Orbweavers (her partner Stuart is the other half of the band), and once again my younger sister Molly lending her limbs in front of the camera. “Poison Garden” is out now on digital release on Mistletone Records via Inertia.
Here is something new I made for Gemma Ray! I originally built a small-scale rotating stage on a lazy susan, intending to use an early rough version of this animation/motion graphic as a guide for a stop-motion idea I had. I thought my mini rotating stage was awesome (and so did Gemma), but eventually I had to admit the project would probably end up taking me a year to make (and I still have projects from a year ago that I really need to finish), so I scaled back and voila! The Wheel is from Gemma’s excellent album Milk For Your Motors out through Bronze Rat.
A couple of weeks ago my latest music video premiered over at The Huffington Post!
It’s Ray LaMontagne’s first ever music video, the Grammy awarded musician was very cool to work for and had some really nice things to say to the HuffPo about my work:
“I first came across Lucy Dyson’s work through the video for Gemma Ray’s lovely song ‘Rescue Me.’ I was hooked immediately. Genius. I was instantly taken with her Terry Gilliam-esque use of layered, ragged cut-out images. To me that was the anchor. A familiar place for my imagination to leap from. But very quickly you realize that the narrative is taking you somewhere that you didn’t expect. It feels like you’re on a roller coaster in some weird circus of the psychedelic burlesque. And yet, underneath all that strange and beautiful imagery there’s this sense that she is truly emotionally invested in the storytelling. To me, it’s like she can see within a song some hidden fourth dimension, a dimension that you didn’t even know existed until she pulls aside the curtain and invites you in.”
Here is the video:
I also made an animated teaser for the song leading up to the single release, which you can watch here:
Kate Miller-Heidke “Ride This Feeling”
Directed by Lucy Dyson
Animated by Joseph Jensen
Sony BMG
Adam Franklin & Bolts of Melody “I Want You Right Now”
Directed & produced by Lucy Dyson
DoPs (UK) Joseph Jensen (USA/Co-director) Elliott Sellers
Starring Jessica Paré (Mad Men)
Goodnight Records
This music video was released a couple of months ago, I’ve been terrible at updating things over here!
Man Without Country‘s latest video Closet Addicts Anonymous was released last week. This is the second video that Joseph Jensen and I have directed for the band (the first being Puppets). We experimented with live video feedback for this promo, using an analog video mixer, a video camera and a CRT Broadcast monitor. Joe and I also created the artwork for the band’s recently released debut album Foe, I look forward to doing a post about the album art as soon as I have a 12″ vinyl copy of the album in my hands.
