Marijana Jocic and I recently co-directed the video for Malmö / Berlin musician Emma Elisabeth’s beautiful song Where Do Tears Go. It’s from Emma’s recently released 6-song EP “We Gotta Talk”, which you can listen to here on Spotify and purchase through itunes
Here is an animation I recently made for London based jazz exotica trio Les Hommes.
“Queen Fez” was nominated in the “Best Experimental” category of the 2017 Berlin Music Video Awards.
Rory More of Les Hommes describes the song as “a heady dose of gritty oganatronic mondorama with touches of Shearing-meets-Monk on a pub piano.” The song was recorded live at Bark Studio and will be available from April 7th on their new LP “The Sinner”
I really loved creating this weird-world eggimation, especially the pool party and keyboard scallop scenes…and the mini golf egghead scene, and the flippity-floppity fish dish…it has it all. Thanks for the inspiration Queen Fez and Les Hommes!
Music video I animated and directed for the song “Don’t Look Back” by Urbanity (Albare and Phil Turcio).
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 month my music video for “Transponder” by Howe Gelb’s legendary band Giant Sand premiered on Stereogum. The video came about when I finished Gemma Ray’s “The Wheel” music video, Howe Gelb’s vocals feature on that track and after seeing the video for it he got in touch about working together. The animation features my sister Molly, who lives around the corner from me and is a really great illustrator and artist. I got Joe to photograph Molly in burst mode in front of our kitchen wall while I directed her to bend, stretch and cry. While I was in the middle of putting the video together Howe was coming through Berlin on tour, so it was great to be able to include him in the video, meet him in person and see him perform, the man is a genius.
Here is a music video I just made for British rock band Turbowolf. The above YouTube embed is probably blocked if you are in Germany, in that case you can watch it here on Vevo. I had to turn this video around as soon as I arrived back in Berlin from Melbourne early last month, but even with jet-lag and not being able to leave my studio for fairly intense period, I felt totally in my element putting this together.
I recently made this music video for Jonathan Jeremiah’s beautiful single Wildfire. The video was released in February and was created by combining some really lovely stop-motion paper animation by Joseph Jensen with my usual collage style animation. My original pitch for the video was a super technicolour sci-fi narrative that unfolded around a volcano spewing weird vibes, but after watching through my previous work Jonathan was really drawn to a black and white animation I made for Luluc many years ago, which was a straight-up homage to Busby Berkeley, so taking that as a starting-point we ended up with this, which I definitely think turned out to be a much better fit to the song than my original volcano idea.
Here is my latest music video, Cuckoo by Still Corners. I love this band, it was such a pleasure to work with them again. The video was released last week and has been well received online. It has featured on Pitchfork, Portable.tv and Urban Outfitters, just to name a few. Cuckoo came out on 7″ a month or so back, and is from the band’s début album Creatures of an Hour, which will be out on Sub Pop, October 11.
Directed by Lucy Dyson
DoP Joseph Jensen
Editor/FX/Grade James Littlemore
Make-up/Wardrobe Alannah Ashworth
