Hasta La Ideas

Directing duo Wriggles and Robins have made a new short for the Lincoln Motor Company’s Hello Again project shot from the perspective of a spinning record.

Record starts with a dizzying view of four different settings: an old people’s home, a bedroom, a dance studio and a house party. As the spinning slows, we see the people in each room responding to the music – dancers choreograph a routine, a couple argues while getting dressed and elderly residents drink tea and play chess.

The film was shot by placing a camera on top of a piece of oversized vinyl placed at the edge of each room. The resulting slow motion footage and panoramic shots offer a fly on the wall-style look at four very different scenes, shot to Amateur Best track Be Happy.

It’s the latest in a series of films commissioned for Hello Again, a project asking young filmmakers to re-imagine something familiar. Animators Becky & Joe also submitted an excellent short inspired by drawn-on film techniques used by Norman McClaren, Len Lye and Man Ray.

“The idea was to capture the different relationships people have with music…we thought it was really interesting to use a record player as a way to tell a story,” explain the pair in a video explaining the making of (below).

The project took around a month to produce, say Matt (Robinson) and Tom (Wrigglesworth), which was mostly spent scouting, casting and building the record player rig. “The shoot itself was across two days and because we were shooting in such slow motion, it took about the same amount of time again to look through the rushes. We spent about a week editing it and adding sound design, before working with online producer Alannah Currie and Jonathan Box at MPC to achieve the right frame ramping,” they told CR.

Many of the scenes in the video were improvised to avoid looking too constructed and the everyday settings were chosen to make the film feel like “a natural observation,” they explain. “We wanted to explore the different places and the different reasons that music gets listened to… we felt that everyday examples that people could relate to would work best. Listening to music to reminisce, to party and to dance to felt like the strongest examples,” they add.

The old people’s home and bedroom scenes were shot at a house in North London, and the house party and dance studio were filmed at Hoxton Hall.“We looked through loads of location sites to find our rooms…it was quite tricky finding locations that had rooms that we could make feel completely different, but we worked with a fantastic art director, Tim Gibson, who helped pull this off,” they explain.

It’s a simple but clever idea, and a lovely way to capture the different moods that one piece of music can create. The film the latest in a series of lovely shorts from Wriggles and Robins, who we first featured in Creative Review’s graduate issue in 2009 – last month, they released a music video for Travis single Moving featuring animations back projected onto the band’s breath. To see more of their work, click here.

Credits

Music: ‘Be Happy’ by Amateur Best
Producers: Tom Allen, Will Teddy
Online producer: Alannah Currie
Director of photography: Luke Palmer
Camera assistants: Simon Lakos, Laurence Halstead
1st AD: Nick Marles
Art director: Tim Gibson
Grade: Richard Fearon at MPC
Flame: Jonathan Box at MPC
Sound: Toolshed Music
Production: Agile Films

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