Nostalgia and Montage: A Music Video
Sometimes you have an idea for a music video and it has to sit on the shelf for awhile before the right commision comes in.
I’d been sat on hundreds of old photos from my childhood, wanting to find a way to integrate them into a piece of work. And then one day, Derw approached me with their new song, “Mecsico” and I knew that this was the track. I wanted to create a whole life-time of experience, the wonder and nostalgia of being young, that feeling of “hiraeth” so wonderfully captured in the Welsh language. And here was the perfect, beautiful, sun-kissed, celebratory song to do it.
The process was three-fold – one, slowly and painfully scan in all the old photos from my childhood and montage those into the edit. , Two – get some lovely b-roll around the coast of South Wales, shooting on both high-end kit and a cranky Lomography Kino with 35mm. Finally, hire a studio space to shoot the singing shots (as always I went to the excellent Firebug in Cardiff) where I also projected the photos to create multiple layers of memory in the edit.
This was a fun commission as the music video was a totally separate thing to the lyrical content, I just vibed with the sound to create the imagery in this one.
This is the sort of commission I love, super artsy and open and abstract, evocative and non-linear, I could play and experiment to my heart’s content. Check out the video and if you’re looking for a music video for your band, give me a shout!