Events BUG 47 Director’s Cut Welcome to BUG, another dip into the world of innovative music videos and beyond, BUG title sequence with Adam Buxton back in the hot seat as your guide. And we’ve reached a new Director: Miland Suman Sound design: Tim Stevens, landmark, having entered our ninth year of shows at BFI Southbank. We started in The Auditory April 2007 with a remit to showcase the most innovative and creative new work in this often underappreciated medium, and highlight what we called the ‘Evolution of Hook N Sling ft Far East Movement – Music Video’ – namely, the changes wrought by new digital technology and the Break Yourself impact of an interesting new platform for music videos called YouTube. And Directors: Nelson de Castro, Carlos Lopez Estrada certainly the evolution of music video continues, as tonight’s show will demonstrate. Production Company: Doomsday Ent We start with the video for Hook N Sling’s Break Yourself by a dream team of young Record Company: Interscope directing talent. Previously Nelson de Castro and Carlos Lopez Estrada have worked USA 2015 as individual directors: de Castro’s big break came by winning the OK Go Music Hot Chip – Need You Now Video Challenge organized by BUG in 2013; while Lopez Estrada has made a series of Director: Shynola acclaimed videos recently – his video for Seattle hiphop band Clipping was featured Production Company: Black Dog Films at the last BUG. But they joined forces to make this cyclical video of a student Record Company: Domino entering a US school bus’ shrouded in Stygian fog again and again, each time UK 2015 encountering a new group – from students to rowdy American football players and The Chemical Brothers – Go cheerleaders to a church congregation and beyond. It’s one continuous move up and Director: Michel Gondry down the aisle of the bus – De Castro and Lopez Estrada insist this wasn’t stitched Production Company: Partizan together, but they might be goofing around… Record Company: Virgin EMI France/UK 2015 Shynola are venerated in music video circles, for their work for Radiohead, UNKLE, Lambchop, Blur, and others. Shynola’s most famous videos have been animated but Son Lux – Change Is Everything the trio have increasingly moved into live action and their new video for Hot Chip’s Director: Nathan Johnson Need You Now shows their command of emotional-yet-surreal drama, with a Production Company: The Made Shop dreamlike video set in the reliably atmospheric Dungeness. Hot Chip frontman Record Company: Glassnote US 2015 Alexis Taylor finds himself divided into three antagonistic parts while dealing with an even more painful split. Run The Jewels – Early Director: Bug & Sluzzy The Chemical Brothers are, of course, titans of British dance music who have been Production Company: Bug & Sluzzy inspiring great music videos for two decades. They’ve worked with several great Record Company: Mass Appeal directors, not least Michel Gondry, whose videos for Let Forever Be and Star Guitar are US 2015 generally regarded as among his very best work. Now they have collaborated again for Go. In a way it’s a combination of both previous works, then simplified – identikit Bob Dylan – The Night We Called It a women execute perfectly synchronised choreography with poles within the Day Director: Nash Edgerton intriguing brutalist architecture of Paris’s Front-de-Seine neighbourhood – where the Production Company: unusual urban setting becomes part of the choreography. The Directors Bureau The next video for Son Lux’s Change Is Everything, is an ingenious creation directed by Record Company: Sony Music US 2015 Nathan Johnson – and animated by him and his wife Katie Chastain – involving lots of drawing pins and 200 feet of rubberised black thread. Visual sequences were Roisin Murphy – Evil Eyes created in 3D, then projected onto whiteboard, and then the pins and thread came Director: Roisin Murphy into play. The rest was all down to old-fashioned stop-motion animation, which Production Company: Squire meant Nathan and Katie pushing pins into foam board until their fingers were raw. Record Company: [PIAS] UK 2015 Hundreds of hours of hard graft paid off with the result – a wonderful visual experience. Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared: 4 The latest promo from New York hip-hop duo Run The Jewels is a very different kind Director: Becky & Joe Production Company: Blinkink of animation; blocks of black, white and red, create a suitably stark, Sin City-like UK 2015 world that not only represents ghetto life, police brutality, incarceration, and mass anger and protest, but also incorporates the lyrics of RTJ’s Killer Mike and El-P Maestro – Darlin’ Celsa themselves. It shows how lines between lyric videos and ‘proper’ videos are coming Director: Parachutes down – and it’s by a newly-formed US animation team who called themselves Bug & Production Company: SlowDance Record Company: Tigersushi Sluzzy. No relation, we hasten to add… France 2015 Perhaps the most surprising film we’re screening tonight is our next one: a beautifully fashioned facsimile of a 1940s film noir starring none other than Bob Stromae – Carmen Director: Sylvain Chomet Dylan. The video for The Night We Called It a Day was directed by his regular video Production Company: th1ng th2ng collaborator Nash Edgerton. Dylan does a passable Bogart impression, vying for the France/Belgium 2015 attention of a proper femme fatale, played by Tracy Philips, with Robert Davi (from The Goonies) as his wiseguy love rival. With marvellous attention to detail, and Action Bronson – Actin Crazy evidently shot with unheard dialogue it is a transfixing work by Australian Director: Syndrome Production Company: Syndrome stuntman-turned-director Edgerton. Record Company: Atlantic On the release of her first new material in 7 years, Roisin Murphy reflects on her US 2015 status as a mature female artist with a pop career spanning nearly two decades. In her intriguing video for Exploitation – also her music video-directing debut – she created a fading-star persona inspired by actresses who continued to burn up the Fur Voice – Fantasia screen well into middle age, like Gena Rowlands and Catherine Deneuve. Now Director: Pablo Maestres Murphy has created a very accomplished follow-up for her track Evil Eyes, once more Production Company: Limón Estudios inspired by Rowlands (and the work of Rowlands’ husband John Cassavetes) with Spain 2015 flourishes that are pure music video. It's a surrealised portrait of family life in which Cold Mailman – Something You Do the star and director gives a riveting performance as a mother whose unpredictable Director: André Chocron behaviour suggests a touch of madness. Production Company: Frokost Record Company: Beyond Music Last week at BUG, our guests were the fantastic Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling. Norway 2015 Becky and Joe met at Kingston Art College and their work started getting noticed when they were part of the larger This Is It collective. Work such as Bad Things That Jus Reign – Bounce (ft Timothy established the sense of handmade artfulness and quirky, very dark Could Happen Delaghetto) humour that has become the hallmark of their later work – in particular, the Director: Jus Reign Canada 2015 phenomenon that is Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared. Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, DHMIS has just released its fourth episode of weirdness which we’ll be screening tonight – Becky hand-crafting the world and its characters, Joe writing the songs and animating, and them both writing and directing this nightmare flipside of a toddler TV show. The video for Scottish/French electro-pop duo Maestro’s Darlin’ Celsa – the first by Parachutes, another of those talented French directing collectives we like to feature – taps into the gamut of negative feelings that a traumatic school career can inspire, as the anonymous middle-aged protagonist flicks through the pages of the Mount Madness Academy yearbook for 1974, to view the eponymous Celsa, the only girl in class. Then by form of telepathy – and in a riot of brilliant After Effects work, channelling Terry Gilliam and Cyriak Harris – he dishes out increasingly imaginative, super-violent revenge on her (and his) classmates. BUG thanks… The show continues with a new video for ever-inventive Belgian superstar Stromae. Adam Buxton He has broken new ground again by recruiting Sylvain Chomet, the award-winning www.adam-buxton.co.uk Join the BFI to take priority! director of The Triplets of Belleville and L'Illusionniste, to direct the promo for Carmen, Many of our films and special events sell out Hosted by: BFI Southbank and create a cartoon with satirical bite about the perils of social media. With Post-production by: Locomotion during the member priority booking period. Join today for just £35 (£20 concessions). Print Creative by: Limited Edition Chomet’s signature hand-drawn style – and character design that echoes the old Event Management by: Ballistic Warner Bros cartoon classics – Stromae warns against the allure of the Priority booking for all films, previews and festivals including The Times BFI London Film unmistakeable little blue bird, who starts out in the video like Tweety Pie, turns into Festival the angry Chicken Hawk, and then into a very big, bad bird indeed. 2 free tickets for the same screening and £1 The LA-based design and live action directing team known as Syndrome have made off tickets for you and up to 3 guests at the BFI Southbank or the BFI IMAX (excluding some of the most watched videos of the past few years, for megastars like Eminem, The Times BFI London Film Festival) Fall Out Boy and Imagine Dragons, often employing very impressive visual effects. A monthly booklet delivered direct to your Their video for hefty New York rapper Action Bronson’s Actin Crazy is another VFX door spectacular, albeit one with an amusing difference: the man otherwise known as 20% off BFI books, DVDs and an annual BFI Arian Asllani takes rocket trips and fights basketball-playing dragons between Library Pass pampering and eating cereal on a greenscreen stage, all in one take.