Wednesday 18 May 2011

Thurs 19th May: Ollie Evans video for Tom Vek's "A Chore"









Since planting his flag in music video directing territories with the pioneering video for The Klaxons "Atlantis to Interzone", Ollie Evans (Partizan) has followed with clips for The Noisettes, The Gossip, Foals, Das Pop, New Young Pony Club, The Young Knives. For his latest promo, Ollie teamed up with his friend Tom Vek for the first single release from his second album "Leisure Seizure". After a six year hiatus from the music industry, "A Chore" provided the perfect opportunity to make a surprise statement with visuals, resulting in a celebrated return for Vek fans!
Over recent times I have been checking in with Ollie's brilliant side project - the underground music / chat show "The Knocking Shop" with its access-all-areas insight to the bands emerging in London. The physcadelic raw energy of this production triggers nostalgia in our generation's fond memories of 1990's after hours TV entertainment. In a similar vein, Ollie taps into another distinctive chapter in the culture of candid television history for Vek's "A Chore", creating a pseudo 70's set which he explained for me:

"As fans of TV Party, Glenn O'Brien's classic cable access from late 70's New York, we both thought that it would be great to use that as a starting point for the video, with Tom playing the host of his own lo fi TV Show (Tom's initials also made this feel particularly right). We wanted to use this TV show format to act as a way to reintroduce Tom, create a mystique and try and answer some questions about where he'd been for the last 5 years.

We threw in lots of clues and symbols that have their own little slices of meaning into the video and without wanting to give too much away, express what's going on in the song, have some fun and play with people's expectations.

We shot at The New Empowering church with its perfect illuminating palm trees, something we'd really wanted to include and by chance happened on it right on our doorsteps.

Abigail Rose played an incredible Debbie Harry in the video, we found her through castings at Partizan. Before anyone came down I asked all of our potential star's to bring there favourite song with them to sing in the casting. Whilst being somewhat excruciating in parts (some of the shit we had to listen to )proved to be a great litmus test as to how well they'd fit into the video, Abi brought the best song and was the perfect for the part.

Everyone involved was great and my thanks go out to them.
"

I also asked Ollie to send over the story board from his treatment to explore the process which Ive selected a few pages from to show you here ......... love his illustrations!










This last shot captures Tom and Ollie in action from on set stills taken during the day by Sonia Melot (see all imagery used in this post - both colour and b/w).

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