mfmi#006
Aaron Graham. Jake Dypka
Pleaser
From the moment I listened to Aarons track Pleaser, I was thinking about making something visual for it. I’m often very reluctant to say yes to things but in this case, it seemed too good not to try. I immediately knew I wanted to accept and embrace a kind of lo-fi approach to making something. A kind of collage approach to making a video had been on my mind a while over lockdown. I’m very interested in the parallels between making music and making moving image and I wanted to embrace a ‘Burial’ style collage approach to making something visual. I know he’s happy to download youtube clips for his music, not getting caught up in the fussiness quality of the sample. I wanted to take that ethos into a visual medium and wanted to try the same approach for this video.This was one of those strange scenarios where nothing got in the way of the creative approach. I was sent the track and the mood and sound of the music struck a chord immediately. I sat down with an empty edit and just pulled a few clips from the internet to see how they might fit and the first thing I put in was an explosion of starlings leaving a tree. I’m still not sure what made me pick that. I had been reading JA Baker's The Peregrine and I had known about Masahisa Fukase's Solitude of Ravens for years. Somehow Aarons music and these ideas all coalesced and something different came out. I really didn’t try anything else, I just started putting clips in and the ideas came as I started working through the edit.From then on I was glued to my desk for about 4 days and it was pretty much done. The only challenge was to keep finding ways to surprise the viewer as the music progresses. It was great fun, it's easy when the music strikes a chord.
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Jake Dypka
mfmi#002
Felix Higginbottom. Henry Mills
Sleep
I often find a lot of music too prescriptive, so dense in the arrangement and lyrical potency that you have no other option but to get on-board or risk losing touch with the sound. Listening to ‘Sleep’ feels pleasantly dissimilar to this. What I admire in the track is the negative space created by the ambient rhythm and rolling chords that influences me to visualise my own narrative.
Throughout the track, there's an overwhelming feeling of conflict between something sinister and something hopeful; a battle between the minor and major chords that continues to feel unresolved. This seems like something close to the experience of melancholia or a dream that takes an eerie unwelcome turn. There is an in-and-out motion to the chords which feels like roaring waves, crashing and retreating in a stirring tide, or perhaps resembling the rhythm of human breath. I feel disoriented, as if my consciousness had been compromised and I have to rely on a distant hopeful sound or bright light as a means of finding my way back to a reality.
Working with these emotional responses, I attempted to create something visually ambiguous; something that represents motion and conflicting feelings of absence and hopefulness. I wanted to illustrate a sense of travel, moving through dark, wet realms without any form of coherence. Using physical effects over the lens of the camera, I wanted to emulate a POV perspective, as if you were looking through the eyes of the victim. There is the suggestion of moisture throughout, as if your face is pressed up to car window whilst travelling through a storm at night or suddenly your head is submerged and you’re grasping for a breath. It is these quick turn of events and impossible shifts in proximity that can only truly be experienced during sleep.
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Henry Mills.
mfmi#003
Becker &Mukai. Matty Mancey-Jones
Spice War - Part2
When listening to B3-Spice War Part 2 (Becker & Mukai) I became captivated by the playful frantic beat. As the track jumps between industrial and tropical sounds I see shapes building and disappearing, like moss growing and spreading. I wanted to blend this organic growth with the futuristic atmosphere of the track, so in the video, I showed the process of creating my own fictional “filter”.
Filmmaking and electronic music are both easily accessible to anyone with a laptop now, and I hoped to celebrate this new DIY era by playing with analogue, (stop motion) and digital (computer-generated animation) mediums. Through plaster casts, plasticine, fake flowers, real fruit, free 3D models and digitally manipulated photos the boundaries between virtual and material are being blurred.
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Matty Mancey-Jones
mfmi#004
Stephen Ettery. Plusminus Studio
Waves
The medium of film has long been used to tell stories, but this piece aims to merely let us find our own truths within it, by offering a screen of changing pixels, varying their colours 24 times a second.
The term tableau vivant is used to describe a static scene in theatre or film, where instead of freezing the shot, the characters freeze in position. By focussing on the nuances of the body, we aimed to observe the involuntary changes in the body such as breathing or twitching, in juxtaposition with the steady tempo of the track.
In his piece “24 hour Psycho” the artist Douglas Gordon aims to have us observe Hitchcock’s classic film at a speed of two frames a second. In doing so the viewer is forced to observe each photograph that make up the film. In using only macro shots of our protagonist, we tried to force the viewer into observing only fragments of the body, in an attempt to have the viewer form a narrative around the images presented to them.
The rolling synths throughout the track lead the viewer between shots, at a pace that is frequently paired with action shots and fast movements. We wanted to contrast that with slower, closer observations of the body, forming a distinction between the tempo of the music and the almost static shots, utilising sharp transitions between the various shots.
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Plusminus Studio