SoundKilda
Subscribe
X

Get the latest from Beat

SoundKilda

unknown-4.jpg

As with hi-fi equipment, cars, food and language itself, Australian-made film has a certain ingenuity about it, a kind of creativity-within-the-confines-of-what’s-available character that provokes a different kind of expression. The 2013 St Kilda Film Festival (SKFF) will again celebrate the unique collaborative symbiosis of Australian music and visual arts with the annual SoundKILDA festival, on Thursday May 30. SoundKILDA, the festival’s music video competition, will showcase 19 of the best new music videos from Australian artists as they should be seen – loud and large on the big screen at St Kilda’s Astor Theatre. This year SoundKILDA will award the filmmakers behind some of the country’s most loved songs for Best Music Video, Best Music Video Animation, Best Music Video Independent and the Audience Award: Best Music Video to be voted on the night, with entries from some of the country’s leading young filmmakers, including Natasha Pincus, Darcy Prendergast, Nash Edgerton and Kasimir Burgess.

“Stop motion is my passion,” says Prendergast, whose production house Oh Yeah Wow is nominated for Gotye’s stop-motion Easy Way Out as well as the more conventional Don’t Wanna Grow Up Anymore for Bob Evans and I Wish That by Stereolove. “After the success of the Gotye clip, we were inundated with requests from various bands to make videos for them, on a much faster turnaround than we did for Gotye. We were required to do more live action than stop motion. And when it comes to making some sort of living off music videos you need to pump them out fairly quickly to be able to put some cash away.”

The Bob Evans clip, for instance, was inspired by Bob/Kevin Mitchell’s appreciation for Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979 video. “He just really loved the vibe of that,” Prendergast says. “I wanted to subvert that, and instead of the teens in a service station or mini mart, it would be geriatrics. I pitched that to him and away we went. I wanted to incite anarchy within the store as well as a sort of heightened realism, I guess!” 

Stop motion has certainly evolved with technology, but it’s still a largely untouched, pure technique despite the impact of digital photography and editing. And it’s a technique that’s close to Prendergast’s heart. “Nothing’s changed,” he says. “It is still one of those beautifully antiquated mediums, and it dates back to Harryhausen’s era – who just died, sadly – but it is an antiquated medium, so really nothing’s changed too much apart from the digital revolution. Now we have the ability to see the last frame and where we’re going in the next frame so we can see how far we’re moving it, but the technique is still the same. We just try to use it in different ways. In the Gotye clip we tried to use it in different ways that were amalgamated with live action stuff, again like Harryhausen, but really pushing the visual effects elements of stop motion, and also how things happen within the clip. For example, when Wally walks through a door his entire costume would change. And we just wanted to pepper the clip with a thousand ideas like that which would make it this visual effects spectacular that melted your mind a little bit.”

Prendergast works in forms outside of music videos too, but it’s certainly an important part of his psychic makeup. “I’ve always loved music videos,” he says. “I’d always be sitting up at 4am as a 17-year-old watching Rage. It’s a really cool medium to explore short ideas and not get too bogged down in features and series and things like that. It gives you a real ability to just experiment and have fun. But I’ve always been an animator and I’ve always loved cartoons as well. I started out doing music clips with that, just doing animated stuff, and then I in essence got a film degree through music videos too, because I never went to film school and I never got educated in how you use live action equipment to make live action films, but I’ve been lucky that through music videos I’ve been able to ‘fake it til I make it,’ really!”

BY PETER HODGSON