Funny how dusting off old projects can ignite new inspiration.
I shot this music video for The Duke of Norfolk in 2013. To capture the shift from winter to spring we spread the shoots out over the course of several months, waking up before dawn to take advantage of the early morning light. When you’re working with friends though, rising early doesn’t feel like a chore.
At the time I was having way too much fun with a shooting technique I had just learned called “lens whacking”. Aptly named because it involves free-handing the lens separate from the camera to create wild focal effects, best done with a camera/lens you aren’t too worried about because the two are definitely going to “whack” together.
It’s one of those niche techniques that’s easy to overuse, which I did. I regret nothing.
In all seriousness, it fit the mood we were going for, and I’m still happy with how the final video turned out. In many ways it has a quality to it that I find lacking in a lot of my later work. Not the look in particular but the commitment to an artistic choice. The corporate marketer side of me that developed in the intervening decade would have worried about getting another take “for safety” or even shooting an alternate normal version just in case. That would have been a mistake. The best artistic expressions require an element of risk. Hedging your bets makes good business sense, but it rarely results in something compelling that speaks to a deeper sensibility.
I’m not saying this video is a masterpiece by any means. Any lasting quality certainly comes from Adam Howard’s music and not my cinematography. But it does have a sense of humanity that reconnects me with a version of myself I thought I had lost. A version willing to try something that people might think is stupid, and do my best at it anyway.
It makes me want to do that again.
I hope I will.