It's a new music video, it's for Ezra Furman, and it's great.
Subjectively speaking.
Take a look!
Ezra pushes so much energy through his music and I knew it would be important to find that same energy in the video for Restless Year. Stop motion might not seem like the obvious choice for that, but with a huge amount of patience from Ezra we were able to make something together which is as energising and adventurous as the song itself.
We made our way around San Francisco frame by frame, step by step, in what is probably the slowest tour of a city I’ve ever been on. Ezra took to the technique almost immediately, and it’s his performance within that brilliant city which makes the video so fun.
We called in some of Ezra's friends to play extra parts in the video, who all threw in with total enthusiasm.
"Can you perform this dance we've made up in one inch iterations?"
"Can you come dressed in a suit and help us pull this armchair down the side of a street?"
"Can we come round to your house, dress you up as death and then walk around the park at night?"
San Francisco's a weird and wonderful city with what felt like an infinite number of interesting locations to shoot in.
The lovely people at Kayo Books let us shoot in their bookshop, which was probably the most distracting location I've ever worked in.
I'm a sucker for pulp paperbacks and I could quite happily have spent the entire production browsing those shelves.
A definite high point was walking through town as dawn broke, photographing the city as it flooded with light while a drunk man followed me muttering “Oh look at me, I’m a photographer, I’ve got a camera”
Thank you, goodbye.
