Page 37 - Fujifilm Exposure_24 Stephen Fry_ok

lights. We filmed a block of flats that actually formed the album cover, but we shot it on film and spent two nights there – 16 hours that produced about four minutes worth of film – but the result is these lights flashing on and off in these flats.
“Then we did some crash zooms with the shutter open, so you get a streaky effect that looks quite amaz- ing. You can do that on video by put- ting down the shutter speed, but it always looks like those TV ‘adventures into the paranormal’ sort of thing. But on film it looks really beautiful. People have asked if we did that in post-, but it’s the result of a lot of patience.
“That sort of image was very urban and summed up the album quite well, and we really wanted to bring that to life. The challenge was making something that is essentially static move, and it was something that we were doing that couldn’t have been achieved any other way.”
Shooting on 16mm film as opposed to video was a very straightforward decision for Smith on this promo as well as others like The Irony of It All.
“We want to give them a cinematic look. Film looks better, more three dimensional, the colours look nicer. So even though a lot of the stuff we were shooting was urban and gritty we wanted to make it look beautiful. Film has a way of smoothing the edges.”
Ben Smithard was given the task of shooting Richard X v Liberty X’s Being
Nobody, a tongue in cheek concept that challenges the idea of manufactured pop with the popular group presiding over the creation of their own clones.
Smithard found himself living out a bizarre reflection of this schizophrenic storyline, as he was working simultane- ously for two very different directors.
“It was very tough for me because both Paul Gore and Urban Strom are so different,” he explains. “I was trying to shoot two things at the same time – using the Fuji 500 and the 250 tung- sten – and trying to make the girls and the guys look good.
“The beauty of it is that it is a bit dysfunctional and a bit chaotic. I kind of like that because lots of things hap- pen, and you get all these happy acci- dents on music videos because of that spontaneity and craziness.
“Time and budget were massive limitations. It was a two day shoot with two cameras, so I ended up lighting two sets most of the time. The crew was about 40 or 50 people. Not that small. We storyboard up to a point, and we had two completely different direc- tors working on it. One does one kind of work and the other does another.
“What was interesting for me was to be working with two directors who were very good at what they did but didn’t normally work together,” Smithard added.
In the last 25 years we have grown used to seeing music we love illus- trated by stunning visual images. What will be really interesting is see- ing where the next quarter century takes us. ■ ANWAR BRETT
Black Betty, Give Me My Lighter Back and Being Nobody were all originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photos from top: Three scenes from the Richard X v Liberty X’s video Being Nobody and the promo for The Streets’ song, Give Me My Lighter Back
Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video • Exposure • 35
focus on shorts