I do so love making movies! I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I trust the people I work with, and I like to think my innocence and ignorance can go a long way… hmm…
It started with my Dad - always behind a home movie camera: mostly of the family, but also big events like magical other-worldly footage he shot of a Celtic - Rangers game in Glasgow. In the physical film on the spool in my hand, a direct link to the event 70 years ago.
I was 13 when I started making 3-minute reels myself – trick photography type movies. Like dramatic film of my sister racing her bike round Victoria Park in Finchley. I spliced together distant tracking shots, close ups, views from the handlebars (tricky, that!) and the inevitable crash into a tree. Oh, how a psychiatrist would have fun with that story!
But music was my real love, of course.
When I had written the song Be Careful How You Go, I rummaged for the reels my Dad had shot, and asked Joel, a film-making relative, to edit the footage to match the mood and feel of the song.
Two others followed, made with Rob Thom - Whisper The World Away, shot in Hendon and Hertfordshire, and then Okarito Ways, made in New Zealand and a club in Elephant and Castle in South London.
Then Let The Wind Carry Me. Cue the wonderful Elspeth Graham. Working closely together for 6 months, learning as we went, we met online each week. The film utilises cutout techniques, but the process was a miniature of something far grander: research, sketches, references - oh, millions of references, from local village photographs in Belarus, to Edwardian family poses from a genealogy site, to works by Kathe Kollwitz and William Kentridge, to 60s album covers and style icons. So proud of her, and the work! (And as a footnote – after over 4 years, we will finally meet in person this weekend!)
For The Endurance, I persuaded the British Film Institute to give me access to original footage from 100 years ago. I learned how to work with pro film software, and found that it’s not just the technical job of cutting up and putting together – that’s the easy bit. It’s about judgement: which cuts, when, the length and speed of each shot. Sequences. How to juxtapose the lyrics - set today - with Shackleton’s story, how to pace the film and bring out the emotion: deciding in which moments sound or vision have primacy. Well, I tried, but I’m no Adam Curtis…!
For Tales From The Undertow there are three studio shoots – one not yet released - closer to traditional music videos, made by the wonderful Zach Denman, in which I was much more Client than Collaborator. Enjoyed that so much too! Lovely to have ‘live’ videos!
Which brings us to my most adventurous project so far. For the last 7 months, I’ve been making a film for my song Captain Collett’s Lament, using hand-drawn animation.
I used all my usual resources to find Liam Perkins, and I loved his work. We met online one cold January day… Well, except that he lives on the opposite side of the planet, in what seems to be perpetual sunshine!
He’s much younger than me (surprise!), and despite his ‘warm’ Wolverhampton accent, I was drawn to him. Perhaps I was intrigued that he’d upped sticks to live in Bali with his beautiful young family, living the hippie dream (saith I, jealously!).
We started talking. I introduced him to the story of Clive Collett – the first man to test a parachute in Britain, on 13thJanuary 1917. I sent him a dossier about Orford Ness, where Captain Collett took that exhilarating, fearless, first blind leap of faith. Collett was born in a place I love in New Zealand (Marlborough), and I found his story and that of his betrothed so moving: Margaret’s story, what became of her and her daughter Marion. The whole idea was driven initially by my love of Orford Ness: liminal, bleak, windswept, beautiful, strewn with grasses and birds…
Liam suggested the animated film The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse as a first reference. We used that as a starting point to discuss how we might represent story, people, landscape, colour, line, shape and drawing styles. We talked about emotional resonance. Little historic details that had found their way obliquely into my lyrics – like the sand caught in the parachute Clive gave to Peggy, the request he made of her.
Liam has a relentless attention to detail, and over several months we talked through sketches, storyboards, mock-ups, work-in-progress. I found that with animation even one tiny line can alter the emotional arc, and we were constantly asking ourselves ‘Is that right?’ and ‘Have we got the balance between historical accuracy and telling the deeper story?’, ‘Are we conveying the beauty - and the jeopardy too?’
But the point is, this is not a documentary. It’s not meant to be a historical record. The song is not, cannot be, was never intended to be, what Clive was truly thinking in that moment, or what ensued later that year. How could it be? In placing myself in his shoes, my intent in the song had been to imagine the feeling, the emotion of that moment, as he stepped off the wing of the plane into the unknown. The fear, the hope, the resignation…
As with many of my story songs, as important to me is how Clive’s story informs a meditation on life: on meaning, purpose, and a person’s identity. The recurring questions about what our lives stand for, and how we - and others - can make sense of it.
These themes seem to preoccupy me when I am working in film. Maybe because I like the challenge of extending the metaphors, placing them in a visual story. Next? I do fancy making a film for Old Bones – a song which is superficially quite straightforward, but which I think cloaks a series of doubts, insecurities, regrets – and hopes. Maybe…