Blog from director of the 2 films in the special edition of ‘Med Sud…’…

What a fun year this has been!  So was just making some notes about working with Sigur Ros, and the good and bad points.

Highlight:

watching Sigur Ros at Alexandra Palace in the company of a group of 6 year-old kids and some of their parents. Half an hour into the set came Hoppipolla and then the Med Blodnasir extended ending, where Jonsi gets the audience to sing along… and the video backdrop came on with footage i had shot a few months previously of the same group of kids i was with, and awed whispers of ‘it’s us!’ could be heard from little mouths (ok, those of you near us will know they weren’t quite whispers… to you people, i thank you for being so understanding!)… which was actually quite magical… lots of happy 6 year-olds went home feeling quite fantastic that evening

Lowlight

Orri suddenly disappearing from view in Mexico and no-one knowing what was wrong or what to do or even how to respond.

Highlight

Being at the Abbey Road recording day. I started to get a sense of Icelandic humour when the band turned up dressed in tophats and tails. the kids’ choir were great, and quite blase about it all. i think they had recorded with Take That or something, so were not to be wowed by some Icelandic indie kids.

Lowlight

My bathroom at home after i had spent days and days developing the super-8 film i had brought back from the tour. It was a mess, chemical stains everywhere. And some are still there. But it was always the aim to develop most of the footage by hand, to give it a home made feel, to allow random  scratches, solarisation and dirt into the process and reflect the way the band had allowed a less polished, more intuitive feel to their recording - recording it fast and leaving in the imperfections, being spontaneous, this is what i wanted to be given some sort of visual life to in the ‘Vid Spilum’ film. Whereas Ara Batur should have reflected the power and concentration of Sigur Ros as a band not scared to work on an epic scale.

Highlight

Screening the films at the Odeon Convent Garden. it looked and sounded great, and the Q&A afterwards was fun, people were genuinely friendly. Even though im sure i said things which probably didnt go down so well. quite a few of the decisions in the film were intuitive, gut feelings, like using the music from ‘Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do’… so when you get asked about it , it probably sounds a bit lame to say ‘i liked it’, but it’s sometimes true. Also realising from people’s questions that they would probably like to see all the footage i shot but didn’t use, especially the interview/backstage footage.

Highlight

Being given the opportunity to make something different. We really all jumped into the project, not sure what we were making, other than that it would be covering a specific period of time (up to the release of the album), that i wanted to incorporate lots of grainy super-8 footage (popular with Jonsi, he was keen for there to be lots of grain! and also George has more than a passing interest in the super-8, having studied film at college). One thing i knew was there wasn’t time or money to make Heima Part 2, so these films had to be pretty different from that film.

Lowlight

Sorry about putting interviews in the middle of the Ara Batur performance, sometimes things seem like a good idea at the time and later you just think ‘what was i thinking?!’

Highlight

Climbing to the top of a mountain in Mexico to an old temple with the icelandic band members (minus Orri). I was last up, but i was carrying two cameras, not that i managed to film much. Thats the moment when you see people all waving at the camera. Generally no one wanted to do anything specially for the camera. But they did wave this once, probably out of charity as i was so flushed from making the hike up there. But it kind of went with the touristy feel of the moment anyway. When i was editing the footage it was difficult, as i didn’t want it to be ‘oh, here’s a shot of a beautiful Mexican landscape’. That was the other reason for filming on super-8, to get that feeling of being on a holiday, or watching old holiday films. i guess that comes across most when some of the band are on speedboats… that was George’s idea to take the boats out, i guess as a distraction while Orri was being given medical checks and no-one knew what was wrong with him. But i liked it as it shows the band having fun, not sitting up a mountain pondering the world’s problems.

Lowlight

Stupid technical things like fucking up some rolls of film in the developing, or having great footage which just wouldn’t fit into the film . One thing the management were keen on was that the super-8 film would be self-contained… once we agreed that it would be a ‘film poem’, and something like a dream, the structure sort of dictated itself.. that’s not to say we didnt have arguments about what should and shouldn’t go in, cos we did.

Anyway, i shouldn’t go on too much. Truth is after a while i forget the low points and just remember the good ones.

Nick A

You can order the special edition of ‘Med Sud…’ and get a free calendar here: [link]