The stories behind 8 of the year's best music videos
From Where’s Waldo? to The Sound of Music, visual inspiration can –and seemingly does – strike from anywhere, as these 8 directors share with us here.
These selections represent our favourite videos from the last 12 months of music. We speak to the creative minds behind them to break down how the visuals came to life, what it was like working with the artists, tales from set, and their favourite shots.
AntsLive
Number One Candidate
Dir. Tom Emmerson
As told to: Duncan Harrison
There was no brief. I had this image of these Swiss horn players for a while, so I just kind of thought backwards. I just thought, well, Number One Candidate is grand and big and epic, and mountains are grand and big and epic. We were freestyling a lot of it, and we didn’t have a very big budget. So we were just like, ‘What feels right?’
I knew I wanted to shoot in the Dolomites. It’s the only mountain range in Europe that looks like that: rolling hills, sheer rock faces. It really reminded me of the landscape of the American west – I love that aesthetic. Me and my co-producer Billy King went geotagging on our laptops to find all the coolest locations, then we made an itinerary. We were hitting around three, four or five different locations all over the Dolomites in a day, driving hundreds and hundreds of miles. We absolutely trashed our rental car, grinding the gears through the mountains.
We didn’t move the camera unless we had to. I feel like a lot of time people don’t understand that a good static image is just enough, you know? Because Ants is such a charismatic performer, you’re afforded a unique privilege to just be able to hold a frame for a while.
If you’re referencing other music videos in your music video then you’re doing something wrong – there’s a million better things to reference. Some of our references were The Sound of Music; old cowboy movies; some documentaries about Alpine horn players; a lot of Milka adverts; a skier called Candide Thovex doing an advert for Audi; and old Clint Eastwood movies.
We shot on a Super 16 Aaton XDR that Isaac [Eastgate, director of photography] owns. He is like James Bond with it – he can assemble and disassemble it blindfolded. It’s not a unique camera, but it was made for documentaries, and it’s really light and small. I think it’s one of the lightest and smallest Super 16 cameras there is. Having said that, it still weighs a fucking ton when you’re bringing a Pelican case full of lenses up a mountain.
Finding that location for the opening shot was one thing; finding the horse was another; finding the pick-up truck and getting permission to film up there… Even finding a road with no fence right next to the grass was a challenge – it had to be straight, and it had to be 300 metres long for the shot to be long enough. Then it had to be orientated the right way for the light, with no buildings in the background. I wanted mountains, sky and hills. We found this place with a little help from Google Maps and from the local firemen that we befriended. It felt like a miracle when we got there – there was a pick-up truck sitting there outside this mountain refuge. It was like 11 a.m. on a Tuesday in the middle of the Dolomites’ off-season. We walked in, it’s full of Italian rural farmer folk. They’re dead silent and turn around. I think we said we were making a documentary about horse riding.
They let us use their pick-up truck. Isaac was in the back with a camera on his shoulder and Ants was riding alongside. Off camera, in front of Ants, is another horse, ridden by the horse-master called Judith Faller. So much went into getting that shot, it was crazy. I think that’s why I feel spiritual off the whole process – the amount of luck we had was just unfathomable.
Benjamin Earl Turner
HEADSPACE/BENT
Dir. Abteen Bagheri
I had this idea to do an animatronic creature buddy film as a hip-hop video. But no one was ever going to be down, because record label timelines are crazy; they can’t create an animatronic creature because they have two weeks to make a video – and I need months. So my only hope was to work with a friend. Lucky for me, my friend Benjamin is one of the best rappers in the world. So I hit him up and said, ‘Yo Ben what’s up? Here’s my idea,’ and he said, ‘Here’s some tracks’. Next thing you know, bang, bang, bang we’re making the thing. And because we’re friends, [we weren’t] operating from a place of fear, but out of a place of trust – and good things start to happen.
I just want to give a shout out to my favourite shot from the video, which is the spinning dumpling shot. And the reason it’s my favourite shot is because it had a lot of haters, like it almost didn’t make the cut. I think in hindsight we can all look at it and kind of all the doubters can sort of objectively agree like ‘Wow, that works, and actually it’s quite good. It’s a banger’.
As for what the video means, we really did want it to be open to interpretation. I’ve read all the different interpretations online and I think the one that speaks to me the most is this idea that everyone has their own personal Habib of the creature. He’s always with us and always protecting us, we just can’t see him.
Ashnikko
Worms
Dir. Raman Djafari
Working on this music video was lots of fun because Ash gave me all of the space to explore this universe.
[For inspiration], I looked into medieval etchings depicting devils, angels and all types of hellscapes. I also looked at [the works of] the Dutch, Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel – his Painting Fall of the Rebel Angels was central to the music video because it showcases this kaleidoscopic, weird, overboard clash of angelic and demonic characters. The sense of chaos and beauty that I think this image holds was my starting point.
We built 3D characters, 3D environments and practical sets, which we shot on camera. Then combining all of them, I put a lot of attention in making them feel tactile and cohesive and tangible so in the end we have a world that is both spooky and weird and ugly – to a degree – but also beautiful and cinematic – almost like a Caravaggio painting with very cinematic lighting. I hope that worked out.
Squid
Swing (In a Dream)
Dir. Yoonha Park
We all wanted to do something that felt very mundane but surreal at the same time. I think the lyrics are based on a dream that Ollie had about climate change anxiety, which led to this idea of a future where all the normal things we do just happen in less space.
So, this took us to this idea of flattening time by seeing the different occupants of a space from different times, compressed into the same frame. We were inspired by Where’s Waldo?, the paintings of Bruegel and a New York Magazine cover photo by Pelle Cass. The space needed to be a place that could encompass a broad range of activities, so a sports hall felt right.
The paths of all the different characters were very meticulously plotted out to prevent them from crashing into each other, but also selectively overlap at different times. The way it worked was, the camera was locked in a fixed position at a very high, wide angle for the whole day and we captured at 8k resolution – which is very high-res – which let us zoom in, pan and scan to allow us to create the virtual camera moves in the edit.
The band were great; really easy to work with and game for everything I threw at them – some of it quite silly. The man loading the potatoes into the cart is the guitarist Anton’s father. He used to be a drama teacher and brought a lot of pathos to loading those potatoes.
I once saw a clip from Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man movie where there was a shot of Kirsten Dunst falling off a bridge, and it was done very simply: she was just rolling away from the camera on an office chair. I always wanted to use that, so that’s how we achieved the swimming gag, which is probably my favourite part of the video.
Nabihah Iqbal
Dreamer
Dir. Zayan Agha
[For this video], I think Nabihah called me on a Saturday night, and then on the Tuesday or Wednesday we shot for one full day. We were running around the city with a small team, like six or seven people, and I think that was really a blessing in disguise because it forced me to take this documentarian’s approach to the music video; we just wandered around. Most of the places you see in the video Nabihah is [visiting] for the first time, so her experience is really raw and natural.
The song really influenced the video because when you listen to the video, there’s this soundscape going on that’s almost dream-like. I really wanted to encapsulate that in the video, especially with the editing of it.
I think a really nice detail of the video is when the beer is lying on the flower bed. It looks like [there would have been] a lot of people involved, with a lot of production design and that kind of stuff. But actually, it was just three or four people doing that and it came out really cool and it was really DIY. Even though it looks like there was a lot of set design – and people – involved.
I really like the song too – it’s one of my favourites of the year. The whole album, in fact, is really nice, and what Nabihah is doing, you know, she’s really paving the way for new, young Pakistani artists.
Viagra Boys
Troglodyte
Dir. Cissi Efraimsson
This was a super fun project. I’ve been friends with [Viagra Boys] since before [this video], so it was quite easy for me to tap into what they wanted because I feel like I have a similar aesthetic to how I think their music sounds.
They played in LA, and I live here. I was just talking to Henrik about claymation and how cool clay is, and he was like ‘Yeah, you’re right! Claymation is really cool’. So we had a meeting and I presented the idea, with the killing shrimps and [the band] as monkeys (everything is very much based on the lyrics of the song). They really liked it and so I didn’t really have to change anything, which was cool.
Nia Archives
Bad Gyalz
Dir. Talia Beale
My references for the video were Simon Wheatley, Mohamed Bourouissa, Elaine Constantine and how could we forget the icon himself, Ewen Spencer. They are all photographers who have a similar approach to composition; almost like a collaging of scenarios, from foreground to background. When we’re out with our friends, going down the street, we always see mini scenarios and happenings that are often unrelated, but begin to inform each other depending on where we place our eyes. That was my approach for the composition of this video.
Nia came to me wanting to create a document of relatable moments within the British girl experience. With that, we were able to create a playground of our own experiences, pulling on real scenarios that we’ve been through during our youth. It created a breakbeat in itself. To pull on those in between moments, that you may not always document – like an aunty braiding and washing your hair, the morning after cigarette, jumping over a wall because you’ve been locked in a park somewhere – it’s not always something that you think of as a ‘moment’ but when you look back on life when you’re older, it’s like, ‘Damn, those were some good times’. Looking back on it now (and excuse the pun), the video is an archive of current youth culture. Specifically resonating with elements of the queer, non-binary and the female experiences.
I feel like it’s always important to shine light on how videos came to life as well. Behind the scenes, the producers Delenn [Vaughan] and Savannah [Kityo]… if it wasn’t for them, this wouldn’t have happened. I wasn’t in the country when we were planning for it, so they went around north and east London finding over 20 locations for us to shoot at. We did over 20 scenes as well, we literally got all of them down. I didn’t do a recce [myself], so I had just seen pictures before turning up on the day.
I think what helped [this process] was simplifying our camera kit. We only used VHS cameras. We had three of them so we had multiple angles and multiple people shooting. We had the main camera, of course, but backups as well – because you never know. The texture of VHS really compliments Nia’s music as well.
My favourite scene of the whole video is the aunty dancing behind Ama’s hair salon. [I’ve been going there] since I was a yute, and that scene was completely unplanned. I just had the camera, the music was playing and I was like, ‘Let me just get that last shot before the day ends!’ and we snatched that real quick. Happy days.
James Blake
Big Hammer
Dir. Oscar Hudson
James initially got in touch because we’d had a brush working together on the music video for [the track] Feel Away that he features on, where I turned him into a singing foetus. He obviously enjoyed that, so he gave me a call again on this one.
For James, this track represented a bit of a departure from what he’d been doing more recently in his music. And so he wanted to do something a bit disruptive, and a little bit dangerous and chaotic, with the video. Something that represented a departure from the more pop-oriented thing that he was doing; something that spoke to this new, more electronic direction (which was actually harking back to his earlier days as a producer in London, making dance music).
So he wanted something disruptive and I thought, ‘What’s more disruptive than robbing banks and smashing cars and having orgies and kebab meat?’ I came up with an idea that was based around this robotic perspective of a dash cam. Everything was going to be built around this idea where we’re seeing the story unfold through the dash cam of this old red Lada. We got it all together and went off to Bulgaria to these backlot sets where they have all kinds fake villages, towns, whatever you want – New York or London, and so on. We built a bunch of extra fake walls in there and smash our car through them. Then as the thing goes on, we switched down onto smaller cars and smaller cameras and started driving through smaller things until we start having a kebab meat orgy, which was absolutely disgusting.
My favourite shot from the video has got to be the last one where the cops come in and smash into the wall there. We only had one go at that, so it was a very heart-in-mouth moment. It went extremely well, so I love that shot!
