Chris Milk - interaktivni filmovi i post-MTV

Premda je autor komercijalnih videospotova i fotografija, Milk radi i eksperimentalne interaktivne filmove i instalacije. Kako se eufemistički kaže - pomiče granice medija (tko zna, možda vas zanima kako će izgledati post-MTV videospotovi). Izvrstan primjer kako mainstream prisvaja nekad avangardističke tehnike (primjerice exquisite corpse).



Chris Milk is an artist known best for his music video work. Most recently he has focussed on advancing technology-generated emotional resonance through innovative interactive video projects like the award-winning “The Johnny Cash Project” and Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown”.
Since his music video debut directing a video for The Chemical Brothers, he has worked with artists as diverse as Arcade Fire, U2, Kanye West, Green Day, Gnarls Barkley, John Mellencamp, Courtney Love, and Modest Mouse. Milk’s work has garnered both viral status as well as a host of traditional accolades, including “Best of Show” awards at the Cannes Lions, D&ADs Pencils, The Clios, and SXSW, as well as multiple Grammy® nominations, MTV Moon Men, and the UK’s MVA Innovation Award. While it has been his most explored passion, the music video is far from Milk’s only medium.
He has numerous television commercials to his credit, his short film "Last Day Dream" has played at festivals around the world, and he directed the 2nd unit of "A Mother's Promise," the Barack Obama bio film that played before his speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
 Milk is no stranger to the design and art world either: in 2011 he was honoured in The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards, in the same year he created an immense interactive installation titled "Summer Into Dust" in conjunction with the Arcade Fire performance at the Coachella Music Festival, and his “Wilderness Downtown” piece is currently on display at the MoMA in New York.
He is a frequent speaker on music videos, technology, art and design, and transmedia filmmaking. 

Director Chris Milk is a pioneer of interactive experiences, whether they live on the web like The Wilderness Downtown and Rome: 3 Dreams of Black, or in real life like Arcade Fire’s Coachella 2011 performance Summer Into Dust. Milk’s latest project, The Treachery of Sanctuary, debuted at The Creators Project: San Francisco 2012 and will be traveling the world to all our 2012 events.
This new piece is a giant triptych that takes viewers through three stages of flight through the use of Kinect controllers and infrared sensors. We spoke with Milk, Creative Director Ben Tricklebank, and the artwork’s programming team to find out how they managed to bring everything together to ultimately allow people to lose themselves for a second.

Interaktivni film Rome: 3 Dreams of Black OVDJE

3 Dreams of Black by Chris Milk

A new interactive music video for the concept album Rome—a collaboration between Danger Mouse and composer Daniele Luppi inspired by the music from old spaghetti westerns. An HTML5 project for use in Google Chrome

Director Chris Milk follows the success of The Wilderness Downtown with a new interactive music video for the concept album Rome—a collaboration between Danger Mouse and composer Daniele Luppi inspired by the music from old spaghetti westerns.
The video is broken into three different dreams. The first, a first-person dreamy video (similar to Milk’s Last Day Dream)—the second, a ride through an ever-shifting landscape—and the final dream, a soaring flight through sky structures. The interactive part is being able to control your path through these environments. But I must say, I was a little underwhelmed with the amount of control—it felt closer to QuickTime VR than Grand Theft Auto.
Milk steps up both the visuals and the technology with a video built mostly with WebGL—an HTML5 technology capable of rendering realtime 3D inside a browser. It’s powerful technology that can truly change how filmmakers tomorrow may tell their stories. What do you think?
[ Requires the Google Chrome web browser ] - Andrew S Allen


Gorgeous Danger Mouse Music Project Shows the Possibilities of HTML5 [VIDEO] by Brenna Ehrlich 

Music video director Chris Milk has once again pushed the boundaries of the traditional music video, demonstrating how HTML5 and WebGL technology can be used to create intriguing stories in-browser.
At Google’s I/O conference, Milk and @radical.media, along with Aaron Koblin from Google Creative Labs, unveiled their most recent project, “3 Dreams in Black.” The video was created for “Black,” which comes off the upcoming album Rome, presented by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi, featuring Jack White and Norah Jones on vocals. Now, anyone can check out the video experience on a dedicated website. (Make sure you’re using Chrome to view it.)
The video takes users through the dream world of a character named Temple, a girl who exists in a post-apocalyptic realm. Gorgeous images of trains, bedrooms and bison in a lush landscape are interspersed with 3D animations of twisting creatures and images, evoking the unreality of a dream.
Users can explore the landscape with their mouses and can contribute creatures using a 3D-model creator. Those creatures reside in a desert that Temple arrives in at the end of the video (look out for Reddit guy).
According to Milk and Co., this is just the first in many experiences — spanning various and sundry forms of media — associated with the album.
Milk and @radical.media were also responsible for “The Wilderness Downtown,” an HTML5 experience created for the Arcade Fire’s album, as well as the accompanying Wilderness Machine (a machine that spits out user-generated postcards during the band’s stage show). Milk also created a crowdsourced video titled “The Johnny Cash Project,” which earned him a Grammy nomination.
If you check out the video now, fair warning: It is a little wonky. However, keep in mind that it is an experiment designed to showcase and test the abilities of new technologies, the same way “The Wilderness Downtown” did. That video experience showed off the capabilities offered by HTML5, including audio, video and canvas tags.
This particular video boasts WebGL, a new technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser. (You can play with the tech here.)
The traditional music video has morphed and evolved in the past year or so, due in no small part to Milk. “We have greater capacity for tracking complex stories on multiple platforms for longer periods of time,” he says in an announcement.
Yes, film-based music videos can still be revolutionary and inspired, but technologies like HTML5 open the opportunities for creating landscapes and evoking moods not otherwise possible in the leanback space of the tried-and-true video format.
Still, we have a long way to go before this kind of video is truly embraced (for one, HTML5 is still in an experimental phase, and there are some hiccups) — take the panel in which the MTV OMA for “Most Innovative Music Video” was awarded. (Disclosure: I was on said panel.) Panelists questioned whether a video like “The Wildness Downtown” was exclusionary, because it only works online and not on television. They also pointed out that it didn’t always work.
However, we are only on the cusp of such artistic frontiers, remember, and as more and more of our entertainment becomes web-based, we can see videos like “3 Dreams in Black” becoming more ubiquitous

Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk’s newest HTML5 venture is an online take on the classic surrealist game of exquisite corpse. In This Exquisite Forest, each tree represents an animation created by improvised collaboration. Users create short animations that build off one another as they explore a specific theme. The result is a collection of branching narratives resembling trees.
Visit This Exquisite Forest and plant a seedling!


Dokumentarac Summer Into Dust  (koncert Arcade Fire) ovdje

The Wilderness Downtown (interaktivni projekt s Arcade Fire)

Social media-savvy band Arcade Fire knocked our socks off earlier this year with a three-way marriage of music, video and HTML5. The group’s experimental new video site changed the way we think about a music video.
Highly interactive and highly personal, the site uses the Google Maps API and the all-new HTML5 spec to great effect. By showing users a Google Street View image of their childhood home from a few different angles, in a handful of constantly resizing browser windows, the site truly challenges the viewer’s expectations of what the intersection between music and technology should hold. - mashable.com

 
Arcade Fire: The First 21st Century Music Video

Posted by: Craig

Have you seen the first 21^st century music video?   I realize that may sound ten years late.  And I’m about two months late highlighting its release.   But the music video for The Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait” must be seen to be believed.   It demonstrates the potent creative possibilities inherent in the next wave of the web.   Director Chris Milk programmed the video in HTML5, using Google maps and street views to take us back to our own childhood home.    It is optimized thru Google’s Chrome Browser, forcing users to upgrade to the best Google offers.  You also have to be willing to reveal a bit of yourself.
But fear not.   While the revelations contained in The Wilderness Downtown experience are rich, they don’t necessarily call attention to themselves.  Like the Arcade Fire’s latest album, The Suburbs,it builds slowly.   The band settles into a more relaxed groove, pushing past the fervor contained in their Neon Bible project.   But a musical trip to our old homes shouldn’t be fraught with all nervous tension.   There are good memories mixed in with bad.   We knew some things then.   And Chris Milk gives us a great way to rediscover the child we were, the dreams we had.
The song is about writing letters.  It is an inherent critique of an instantaneous, text messaging era, when we expect immediate answers.    We used to wait for letters to arrive.   Winn Butler laments, “Now our lives are changing fast, hope that something pure can last.”  He encourages us to seize the day, “I’m gonna write, a letter to my true love, I’m gonna sign my name.”
How cool to see the latest technology used to challenge us to slow down, to wait, to gain enough focus that we can follow through on our best intentions.

Milk has already established himself in the industry, winner video director of the year back in 2007.   Amongst his career highlights, Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky”, “The Saints are Coming” collaboration by U2 and Green Day and Gnarls Barkley’s freaky and funny, “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul?”  You can see his oeuvre collected here.
And while you’re exploring his work @radical media, dig Milk’s captivating and creative Johnny Cash Project. I felt almost giddy, painting a frame of a Johnny Cash video, honoring the deceased Man in Black.  Mortality looms large in the Cash universe.   Yet, Milk gives fans a chance to extend his artistic legacy.   It harnesses the creative power of the Internet, crowd-sourcing one of the coolest videos I’ve ever seen (and the first one I participated in).   “Ain’t No Grave” can hold Johnny down,  Ain’t no smarter director rethinking what music videos can be–thirty years after MTV. - globecat.blogspot.com

Instalacija The Treachery of Sanctuary 

Johnny Cash Project

Crowd-Sourced Johnny Cash Video Scores Grammy Nomination by Brenna Ehrlich 

This year, a dark horse has entered into the Grammy race, an ever-changing, crowd-sourced, interactive music video featuring a musician who is no longer among the living: The Johnny Cash Project.
Facing off against wildly popular adversaries, such as Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” (more than 300 million YouTube views), Cee-lo Green’s “F**k You” (32 million YouTube views) and Eminem & Rihanna’s “Love The Way You Lie” (around 200 million views), The Johnny Cash Project’s “Ain’t No Grave” has been nominated for Best Short Form Music Video in the 53rd annual Grammy Awards. Pretty impressive for a vid that, 1). Is created anew daily by fans from around the world, 2). Features a singer who passed away in 2003.
According to video director Chris Milk, The Johnny Cash Project — produced by Radical Media — came together in a rather fortuitous way. Milk was in Portugal at an art and technology conference back in 2009, where he met Aaron Koblin, who currently heads up Google Creative Lab’s Data Arts Team. The two got to talking about their work — Milk has directed music videos for the likes of Gnarls Barkley and Kanye West, Koblin was working with crowd sourcing (Koblin has done a ton of crowd-sourced art projects, such as “Sheep Market,” a collection of sheep drawings done by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk).
“It was like ‘you got your chocolate in my peanut butter, you got your crowd sourcing in my music video,’” Milk says of the conversation. “We started talking about how those two things could work together.” Koblin and Milk also collaborated on “The Wilderness Downtown,” an HTML5 masterpiece of a music video done for Arcade Fire.
“We knew that we would need an artist that had a certain level of universal love for them already existing, and that’s a difficult thing on the Internet nowadays because you only have to go a couple of pages deep to find millions of haters of everything,” Milk says. “So I left Portugal knowing what I had to find in an artist and totally unsure of who that could possibly be, because an artist like that is one who has passed away, in most instances, and those artists are usually not coming out with new albums.”
Lucky for Milk, music producer Rick Rubin had the golden ticket. A month after Milk got home, he and Rubin got to talking about doing another project. They had previously worked on a video for Green Day and U2.
“I do have this one idea, but it really requires a unique and special artist that I don’t know exists in the current musical landscape,” Milk told Rubin. “For instance, if you had a Johnny Cash single that was left over that you were going to use for a benefit album or something, this could be a perfect project for that single.”
Rubin just smiled and said, “This is fate, because I’m finishing the final Johnny Cash album right now and I’m at a loss what to do for a visual component to it.”
“When Rick played the song for me, everything really lined up in that moment,” Milk says of the single “Ain’t No Grave.”
“Johnny is really singing about his own mortality, and resurrection and eternal life. And this is a concept where Johnny’s fans, through their own love and creativity, are giving him that eternal life that he’s singing about. The video is really a visual manifestation of all of that love for Johnny coming together into something tangible and permanent.”
The video(s) in question is The Johnny Cash Project, a dedicated website where fans can use a specialized drawing tool to redraw a frame of footage of the country legend. “It was important to me that we built our own drawing tool to democratize the submissions,” Koblin says. “We really didn’t want people opening $50,000 CG software and competing with folks drawing on napkins.”
Consequently, fans all work on their submissions via The Johnny Cash Project website, where their work is added to videos that all alter twice a day.
“We call it ‘a living portrait,’ because it’s a portrait of a man that just keeps growing and changing and evolving, and it’s all through the love of his fans and the effort and creativity that they put into it,” Milk says. “It’s never the same video twice.”
When Milk and Co. were called upon to send a cut to stations for traditional broadcast, they created the video at the top of this page, which is prefaced by a short documentary featuring people who contributed to the director’s cut of the vid. “It’s nice to see the faces behind it and the humanity that’s behind every single frame of the piece,” Milk says.
And that’s what’s so singular about The Johnny Cash Project — behind every frame is a real person, a fan. Over the last few years, we’ve seen web video becoming less of a passive experience — it’s an inevitable transition, given that we’re watching these videos on our computers instead of passively from the couch.
“It’s a whole new canvas with a whole new set of paints,” Milk says. “And you can create things that you never could before.”
“I don’t know if [the web] will ever resolve and become the defined art form that cinema has become,” he adds. “Maybe the web is so ever-changing and growing that the art form will also be ever-changing and growing. But for me, as a director, as a maker of images that move, it’s an amazing, awesome time to be making stuff.

Rome - Two Against One 

& još toga na Vimeu & YouTubeu:

An Interview with Chris Milk

"THE LENSBABY LENSES SHOT WITH A WIDER APERTURE HAVE THAT BEAUTIFUL SOFTENING AT THE EDGES....YOU CAN ALSO MOVE THE LENS DURING THE SHOT AND CHANGE THE FOCUS AREA. LIKE YOU’RE SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT PART OF THE MEMORY."

September 2009

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO MAKE THE FILM?

It was a film for something called the 42 Second Dream festival in Beijing China. 42 directors around the world each did a 42 second film based on dreams. David Lynch, Mike Figgis, Leos Carax, Larry Clark, Abel Ferrara, Floria Sigismondi, Jonas Mekas, Harmony Korine, Kenneth Anger, all contributed. I was thinking about what kind of story could be told in 42 seconds. That then evolved to what’s the biggest story you can tell in 42 seconds. And that led to trying to tell the story of one entire complete life from start to finish.

HOW DID YOU COME TO THE DECISION TO USE A LENSBABY ON THE PROJECT? DID YOU USE BOTH THE COMPOSER AND THE MUSE? IF SO, WERE THERE CERTAIN SHOTS THAT YOU HAD TO USE THE COMPOSER OR THE MUSE OR DID YOU FIND THEM TO BE FAIRLY INTERCHANGEABLE?

I thought a lot about how to visually represent moments of a person’s memories. I did not want to do the aged super 8 look for the older stuff that you see done quite a bit. It’s his personal POV you are seeing through, not home movies, so the visuals should be uniform. But since they are memories I thought there should be some degree of deterioration around the edges, like real memories would have. When you remember things, you probably don’t really have a clear image of the peripheral details. The Lensbaby lenses shot with a wider aperture have that beautiful softening at the edges. And the amazing bokeh you get hides things in the depth of the image. You can also move the lens during the shot and change the focus area. Like you’re searching for the right part of the memory. Also at the time this was before the 5d firmware update, so I really needed a lens that let me control the aperture manually.
I used all three lenses, the Muse, the Composer, and the 3G (the Control Freak was not available yet). I used the 3G the most often as it has the freeform capabilities of the Muse but you can control and fine tune it when you need to like the Composer. The Muse I used a couple times when I wanted to do abstract focus racks in the shot but didn’t want the microphone to pic up the noise you’d get if you did that with the 3G. I used the Composer in the underwater housing as it was the only one that worked with the housing’s focusing system.

HOW WAS SHOOTING WITH A 5D DIFFERENT FROM WORKING WITH A FILM CAMERA OR DIGITAL VIDEO CAMERA?

The 5D’s low light sensitivity allowed me to shoot the entire film without any movie lights. Everything was natural light with a bounce card or a silk here or there. For the scene in the back of a car at night I shot with a taped piece of paper over the car’s dome light to diffuse it a little. A scenario like that would not have been possible to shoot with a film-based camera.
The fact that the camera looks like a normal SLR allowed me to shoot freely wherever I wanted without calling any attention to our production. In LA, even shooting with a video camera can get you in trouble without a film permit. With the 5D you look like the run of the mill tourist. We shot everywhere and no one paid any attention to us.
Personally, if I had my choice, aesthetically I still prefer film. It has more depth and there is a built in subconscious cinematic tone it strikes in people. But shooting a full 35mm motion picture production is a huge ordeal with a matching price tag. For something like this, a personal short, shooting digital allowed me to actually produce it in the first place. It never would have been financially feasible to shoot it otherwise.

HOW DO YOU THINK THAT THE NEW SLRS WITH VIDEO CAPABILITIES ARE GOING TO CHANGE CONTEMPORARY MOVIE AND VIDEO MAKING?

The SLR is not a viable platform to shoot a professional feature length film on. It’s the wrong shape and balanced awkwardly. That’s not to say it can’t be done. But the form factor has to be completely built out to accommodate things like follow focus or handheld operating. For what I was doing in this film my shots were one second long so it didn’t really matter. But if you had longer shots, with actors, complicated blocking, focus racks, and camera moves, you’d for sure want a more robust platform.
I’m most excited about these new super sensitive 35mm gate sized sensors, and the ease of having a file come straight out of the camera and into the editing software. On my film I was unhappy with a shot on the last day of editing. I ran out and shot it again. No developing or film dailies to worry about. It was in the cut at full resolution an hour later.
I have no doubt digital will eventually surpass the quality of film. It’s a technological given. I’m looking forward to the day when I can shoot with barely any light, have my footage available instantly, AND have it look better than film. - lensbaby.com

Chris Milk is one very lucky fellow. He's also a very talented one as well.
Milk, in a very short amount of time, has gradually become one of the leading music video artists of our time, starting out big by directing Kanye West's breathtakingly powerful clip for "Jesus Walks" and then moving on to work on clips from everyone to Modest Mouse to Courtney Love, Green Day & U2's one-off collaboration to the most abstract, heart-ripping (literally) clip for Gnarls Barkley's "Who's Gonna Save My Soul?". Like Jonathan Glazer and Mark Romanek before him, there isn't a "trademark" to Milk's vision: just nothing but high-quality work that reflects the needs of the song, not the record label. Alternately funny and dramatic, touching and exciting, Milk -- sitting down with Evcat in an interview that has taken close to year to happen -- finally spills on the inspiration behind some of his classic clips, how he used to pretend to be an industry client just to get copies of his favorite promo clips, and wishes to one day have people ascribe meaning to music videos in the same way they do their favorite songs ...

>>First thing is first: Gnarls Barkley's "Who's Gonna Save My Soul". I must say, this clip seems to be a tipping point for you, as it melds both your surrealistic comic sensibilities with the gritty, emotional gravitas that fills up your videography. What was your inspiration, and -- ultimately -- what do you hope people take out of this?
Thanks for saying that. It stems mostly out of the personal experiences I’ve had in relationships. I’m more drawn to these sort of stories and would love to tell them more often. Dark, comedic, surreal, this is the type of material I respond to in features, and it’s the kind of music videos I love to write. I’ve actually written a lot more of these but they’ve never been produced. Some of my favorite Kanye videos are sitting in a notebook and will never happen. This Gnarls video I’ve pitched to 3 or 4 bands over the years. I’m actually glad they all said no because I think it was predestined to happen with this song. The emotion and musical tonality line up too perfectly. It had to be this track. As far as the “take away” I don’t really like to think in those terms. All I can do is make something I personally find compelling, put it out there, and maybe it works for other people. I’ve certainly had occasions when it hasn’t worked for anyone. My ex-girlfriend for instance did not care for this Gnarls video at all.
>>When a video director breaks big into the market, it often feels that they go from being popular to damn near ubiquitious overnight, taking on any and all comers, spreading themselves creatively thin in the process (Mark Webb immediately comes to mind). Yet you have been very selective in both your commercials and videos -- what, ultimately, draws you in to working with a particular artist? How has your creative process changed over time?
What’s funny is that when I was trying to get my first video I wrote on any track they would send me. I wrote on some of the most embarrassing music you can think of. None of them would give me a video. I used to write constantly every week, never went out on the weekend, just sat home and struggled to come up with concepts to music I didn’t like. It was over a year and a half of this before I got my first video. By dumb luck and the good graces of God it was for a band that I loved, the Chemical Brothers. Kanye West saw that video and was determined that I do his first video with a budget off his first album. When Kanye broke big I did in a way as well. That was my third video. I had the luxury that most videos directors don’t get of getting to be choosy early.
I decided a while ago though I had little desire to be prolific. I would much rather do a small body of work that I’m proud of than be the guy who does thousands of music videos and works with every artist. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I respect it, it’s just not me. I can’t work that way. I do one project at a time, and obsess over it until it’s finished. I live small. I drive a 96 Volvo turbo wagon. I have very little overhead. I don’t have kids in private school or a Ferrari payment. I can do the few projects I’m really interested in a year, and still be fine.
The artists I’m drawn to are the ones that value music videos as a viable art form in its own right. We are creating something new together. Yes it has the song, but ultimately it’s creatively a new work. Sometimes there are artists that I love, but I just can’t figure out a visual component for the song. So I end up turning it down. Those kill me.
And by the way, I think Mark Webb is really talented. It’s not easy to be consistent with work spanning such a wide range of artists, and I think he has been. Plus his movie is top notch.
>>What videos/directors do you draw inspiration from?
When I was in film school I used to call DP agents pretending I was a potential client to get 3/4 video copies of the clips I was obsessed with. Most of them were by Mark Romanek, David Fincher, or Spike Jonze.
>>Much has been made of your multiple collaborations with Kanye, and -- of course -- there's the fact that he made three different versions of his "Jesus Walks" video, though yours, ultimately, is considered the definitive version. Is it strange to see multiple versions of clips like that floating around -- does it somehow detract from the ownership of your work? (I feel this question particularly interesting for video directors, as we very much live in the age of YouTube/viral media now)
Not really. The "Jesus Walks" saga is a long one that I won’t recount here. But I’ll tell you that Kanye’s intention was never to have all three videos released.
Seeing someone else’s interpretation of a video you had in your head happens all the time. Usually though you lost the job to someone else. Personally I find it fascinating to see someone else’s interpretation. You can get so locked inside your own head with an idea that it’s refreshing to see another angle on it. The more the merrier.
I have a sort of fundamental philosophical problem with music videos though. I’m actually not a big fan of the finite nature of them, like “this is the ultimate definitive sequence of images to accompany this song. There shall be no others”. I think one reason raw music at its core is so powerful is because it intertwines with people and their lives. They sing along to it in the car, it emotionally scores that one summer they had, it allows an interaction and an involvement on the part of the listener. They can make it their own.
Music videos don’t have that. It’s always “here’s the video, shut up, watch it, now go about your life”. I would like to find a way that people can invest in a music video the way they invest in a song. We’ll see though, I’m working on some ideas.
>>Finally, so far in your career, what's been your biggest regret, and -- conversely -- what's been your proudest accomplishment?
Biggest regret is working hard on a music video for 4 months, that by my own rules I shouldn’t have been doing in the first place, nearly perishing in the process, only to have the record company re-edit and animate over the whole thing, then ban me from the label for taking my name off it.
Proudest accomplishment, really I just feel incredibly lucky that I get to make music videos for a living. Five years ago my goal was to just do one before I died. - globecat.blogspot.com

The Chris Milk Interview: Just Under Twenty Questions

What's been the most difficult video you've directed?
Courtney Love “Mono
What's influencing you of late?
I'm trying to shoot more in a documentary style even if the narrative is completely manufactured.
Do you have any video guilty pleasures?
started it all for me and I still love it to this day. When I met John Landis I told him I owed my entire career to him.
What are some of your favorite and least-favorite trends in videos right now?
Not crazy about all the cutout after effects videos. I realize it's a byproduct of trying to make today’s lower budgets work, but emotionally, for me anyway, I have trouble getting emotionally invested in them. I don’t know if it’s a trend, but my favorite thing is when directors try to tell compelling stories. Any particular reason for the locale of the Modest Mouse video that you shot in Romania?
The band was on tour in Europe and Romania is very cheap and has a beautiful countryside. We never could have shot that video in America for the budget we had. What was the point in your career where you felt that you went from being an aspiring director to a director?
Probably never, I'm still amazed when someone actually knows who I am. I feel like I’m winging it on every video. Every job I'm throwing up till the last day of shooting wraps. Being a director, do you think that you notice more details in other videos, or is that only with the stuff that you shoot?
Probably, I watch videos with a pretty critical eye. It's difficult not to when all you do is critique your own work day in and day out. You must get dozens upon dozens of people like my boyfriend sending you e-mails asking, "Hey, how can I make it in this business?" Does it get frustrating? Do you answer everybody? Do you have stock answers?
I answer every single email eventually. I say eventually because sometimes it takes me an insultingly long period of time to do so. I don't have any kind of form letter I send out although it’s not a bad idea. I do give a lot of the same answers though because I am getting a lot of the same questions. For the most part I write them fresh because it’s too cumbersome to go back and find and old email to copy paste. I want to do a FAQ on my website but I've been too busy to get to that as well. Are there any old songs (that have videos or not) that you would have loved to have done the videos for?
Any Cure song. All I want to do in life is a Cure video. There's a lot of that movement from music video director to feature film director. Do you have those ambitions?
I do Is there anything in the works or do music video directors usually just get handed bad action films based on video games (or ‘70’s TV shows)?
I've been sent a lot of scripts and have only ever liked one. I'm extremely picky. There are two routes to go for your first film if you want to do a second and third. Either do a film that is a box office success, or a film that is critically acclaimed. The latter is infinitely more difficult to find and produce, and is the path I've chosen to follow. There is no reason for me to waste time doing a stupid movie. I sincerely love music videos, I'm not doing them to transition into features. I will make a film when I find the right script, until then, I’ll keep doing what I already love to do. Last year I saw a trailer on your site called “Weatherman.” Is that connected to the Nicolas Cage movie that’s coming out?
That was the single script of 500 I've read that I liked. The script was making its way around Hollywood a couple years ago. I adapted a short out of the feature script to illustrate the tone in which I would direct it. This kind of movie lives or dies by its tone. It's also not the kind of movie they give to a music video director. So I shot a 2 min adaptation to show to the producers when I met with them. Unfortunately Gore Verbinski (The Ring, Pirates of the Caribbean) later became interested in directing the movie. My film credentials have a tough time going up against Gore's. Hence, Gore Verbinski's The Weather Man. Do you feel that one particular style of music is easier or more difficult to write video treatments for or does that just vary on the people you’re working with?
The difficulty or ease of the writing never correlates to the type of music for me. Either it sparks an idea in you or it doesn’t. It’s completely random. It seemed for a long while that the typical style for a hip-hop video involved really bright lights and a fisheye lens (well, anyway, it did to me, as a casual observer.) Is there a new trend now?
I honestly don't know. I don't really watch a lot of hip-hop videos. They still seem pretty similar to one another from what I’ve seen. Any videos making the rounds right now that you absolutely can’t stand?
I hate my Jet video. It’s too one dimensional. As far as other people’s work goes, anyone that puts themselves out there and tries to make a piece of art deserves a lot of credit. It is not an easy thing to do, making a music video. I'd never dis anyone for directing something if they put their heart into it. Typically do artists say “I’m looking for a fairy-tale, surrealist” kind of thing and wait for your treatment, or is more restricted or loose than that?
Most of the time now they just let me write something. I used to get really detailed briefs at the beginning of my career but that seems to have stopped. I think once people understand what kind of work you do, they trust you more to just come up with what you see for the track. The best scenario really though is if you to get to speak to the artist before you write. I'm not looking for an idea, I'm just trying to understand them and their sensibility. Usually the best work comes out of that scenario. But sometimes you know the band’s sensibility already just by their reputation. You know their politics and the way they think and you write accordingly. I still to this day have never met or spoken to Audioslave. Do directors get irritated when musicians take the reins more on their videos, or is that welcome?
I always welcome creative input. On many tv channels their name will be on the video and mine will not, so they need to be comfortable with the statement. I am the director however, if you second guess everything you will be guaranteed mediocrity. Luckily that has never happened to me on a music video. Tons on commercials though. Can you briefly describe your most favorite treatment that you’ve written lately?
I wrote this one for the Cure. It was my dream treatment for my dream band. Never happened. How does it feel to be the 133rd person interviewed for Zulkey.com? - www.zulkey.com The Wilderness Machine:

2013 - Will make his feature film directorial debut with Bitterroot

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