Again I don’t change my method.  Joshua was very interesting as a person and again we were lucky enough to experience a master artist [on the violin in this in instance] perform for us and we do our best to translate it into a visual language.  My main focus is to be respectful of the music and passion these artists put forward.

I had wanted to work with the School of Seven Bells for many years, since meeting them initially in 2008.  I was luckily enough to get the opportunity via Flaunt Magazine to do a portrait session with them in 2009, by this point having thought out a deep approach to their visual identity from my point of view.  We had an amazing stylist, Alice Bertay on the shoot as well as great hair and makeup, a very creative crew overall.  Mal Torrance did production design and propping and everyone put much creative energy into the shoot.  I felt the band were working in a method of ritual electronics, using music in ceremonial way, and I wanted to convey that spirit in our images.  This portrait session led to discussions of doing a music video, but our schedules were conflicting.  I’m not sure where the suggestion came from but I had been wanting to make a long-form, abstract film for some time and the idea arouse to create visuals for their next tour.  This idea was very exciting for me as it opened up the sometimes constraining aspects of editing and creating a music video that has to be cut in a certain fashion to work properly, the visuals for the show didn’t need to have a narrative, nor live action, no beginning and no ending. It was very freeing and I could use my influences in the world such as Jordan Belson and harry smith as reference points. 

To create this amount of material, over an hour, was a bit daunting.  The longest film piece I had created at this point was about five and half minutes long!  After doing some initial video feedback tests I met with the amazing Flame artist Alvin Cruz and created a system with him, where I would shoot material in small setups with objects, light, etc and pass it over to him.  He would then do various effecting and morphing in flame, then we would break that down and decide what worked best, then I would go back and shoot more material based on this.   Knowing that this would be projected very large, I cut out small paper dolls of the band members and glued them to the monitor we would watch down the footage on.  This way we could make sure the overall feel was working on a large scale and where certain projections would end of overlapping the band, etc. This very organic process lasted a few months until we had a large amount of material which we cut into different tracks.  Seeing the band perform in front of it, projected 35 feet high, was one of the highlights of my career and my life.