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Smith's Pixel Terror | |||||
by David Knight - Promo Magazine Having carved out a reputation north of the border for his impressive widescreen videos made on impossibly small budgets, Martin Smith achieved major label recognition Down South when Virgin summoned him to re-shoot a Bellefire video earlier this year. But from the look of his next project it would seem this was less than a satisfactoy experience, because Smith's video for Smoke's Stand Up, the latest product of the 4 Minute Wonders scheme, is like an angry reaction to everything he's done before. Anti-slick, anti-wide format and virtually an anti-promo, Stand Up has the discomforting quality of secretly-shot footage inside a terrorist training camp. Even more sinister and controversially, the terrorist trainees appear to be Brittish schoolgirls. "It's an anti-war film - definately my nightmare vision of the future," says Smith. "I couldn't help but be affected by images of war and terror, Al Jazeera Television and suicide bombers. The idea is transferred to Britain, at a time when it's normal for kids to be trained by terrorists." To create the necessary lower-than-lo-fi-effect, Smith turned to an old-school gimmick, beloved of arty film makers in the late eighties: the Fisher Price Pixelvision 2000 "toy" camcorder. The result is an eery, nearly negligable black and white image (quite how F-P thought this would appeal to tots frankly boggles the mind) that creates exactly the right effect. Producer Tracy Skelton says, "With 4 Minute Wonders videos people usually pull all the favours they can to make the £4,000 budget go as far as possible, but we decided to take a different approach." She says this was partly a reaction to their first pop video experience. "The feel and shooting style, the edit - everything had to be absolutely "wrong," says Smith. "Every aeasthetic I'd learned was chucked out of the window, but that was liberating and I think it really fits the piece. Film was too high production value, DV was too clean, too modern. I tested cameras from way back, the more broken or unconventional the better. I went with the kids' camera because I had never before seen footage more basic. It's amazing" dir: Martin Smith; prod co: Ben Trovato; rec co/commissioner: Savalas Underground Developments/4 Minute Wonders | |||||
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