A Ffresh approach to music videos

24 February 2006

A NEWI student celebrated a huge win at the Ffresh Moving Image Festival of Wales last week with a unique and innovative piece of film production.

Chris Owen, a final year student on the Moving Image honours degree course won the Music Media Award at the ceremony held at Aberystwyth Art Centre for his work, entitled ‘Seconds of Arc.’  What is particularly unusual about this music video is that the filming was done first and then the music was written to match the film work not the other way around. The filming all took place from inside Chris’s car on dark, rainy nights.  The objects recorded include various lights filmed through raindrops on the car windscreen.  Lights such as traffic lights and street lights feature in the video but the techniques used during filming and production mean they are distorted and unrecognisable as every day objects. 

Chris said, “The idea was to hide the origin of the objects which had been filmed and to produce an abstract piece of work which was about colour and fluidity.  I then wrote the music to fit with the images to make them seem mysterious and sinister.  I’m not a musician and have never written any music before.  It really was all about making the music fit the visuals.”         

“Seconds of Arc was chosen because music and image are inseperable in creating the overall effect” said juror of this category Emyr Glyn Williams of Ankstmusik.  “I loved the deeply mysterious images and the picture quality is also of a very high technical standard”

Over 250 student hopefuls submitted entries for Ffresh 2006. 45 were then shortlisted, and a total of 11 awards have been presented.  Chris said he was amazed to have won the category, “I am really surprised, I didn’t expect to win at all because my work was so abstract.  I thought the Music Media Award would go to a more traditional type of music video.” 

Chris will graduate from NEWI this Summer and plans to put his skills to good use doing freelance camera work.  He has already been involved in a number of exciting projects doing filming work for a local production company and wants to do more of this sort of work in the future.