London Symphony Orchestra Concert
Residencies: British Musicians in China
Selector on air in China
Little Boots Shake DJ Tour Beijing Stop
King’s Singers Shanghai Concert
Bestival2011
London Jazz Festival 2011
Westlife China Tour
Music in the Summer Air
InMusic Festival 2011
Creators Project 2011
James Blunt China Tour 2011
Mogwai: Asia Tour Shanghai Show
Soul2Soul Sound System Live in Shanghai
Suede China Tour 2011
Brian Ferneyhough’s Lecture and Concert
Castalian String Quartet
AirplayUK Front Page
Programme Notes
Nima Nourizadeh interview for AirplayUK
I sort of fell into being a video director actually, it was never a direction I thought instantly, that’s what I want to do, although I did really like music videos. I graduated from arts school and I was doing fine art, film and video.
Me and some friends had a DV camera that we shared, so I just borrowed the camera to shoot stuff…it was more like a practice thing and I wanted to build some sort of reel together.
The first actual video I did was for my brother. At the time, he had just put out a single, he produces dance music…I’d just come back from New York where I found this pavement. I was just sitting there one day and loads of people were stumbling over a crack on the pavement…I just sat there filming people secretly tripping over, so I had tonnes of footage of people buckling and it just looks really really funny. I also filmed this crazy guy dancing around and I cut all that to my brother’s music and I got a grand for it, it was brilliant! At the time, it was the first money I’d got for anything I’d done, which was really cool.
We did 3 videos as The Imaginary Tennis Club, where me and Simon were the Directors. Our first video was for Junior Senior called ‘Rhythm Bandits’, the one after that was Pink Grease ‘The Pink GR ease’…. It’s kind of Old Grey Whistle Test, it was a mix between that and a vampire set up. It was quite bizarre but it was cool at the time, I do really like that video.
When you’re working with other people there’s a tendency to compromise on things. If you’ve got 3 people wanting to direct the same project, it’s really difficult to have everyone being happy with exactly the same thing. I felt it pushed us away a little bit and we started doing our own stuff.
The ‘Architecture in Helsinki’ video was literally a no money job, actually that’s a lie it was about £300. I don’t know how I went into that direction but I did and it was getting the band on a roller coaster and mounting a camera at the front and getting the lead singer to lip sync to the track. I timed the track to the ride so I varied the speed, when they went up a slow bit they’d reach a certain point in the track before the drop. I wanted it to work musically. What I did was I had the track on my ipod, so I gave it to the lead singer and told him to sing really loudly so the others could hear him singing and they knew where they were in the track having heard him, it was such a kind of low-fi in every way production, but it worked.
It was the first video where people took notice of me. The more you know about a band the better it is so if you get that opportunity to sit face to face with them or go for a beer with them it’s incredible, what you get out of it is really really good. What I do is if that opportunity isn’t there, then you either know the band already and know a lot about them or you research the hell out of them.
We first talked about doing this video before they got signed to EMI. The idea was a deconstruction of the whole special effects videos. The idea came about from not having any money so we thought let’s do a green screen video, make it look like an offline edit and that seemed really cool because we had actually seen an offline edit that looked better than the video itself! (laughs). It was a bit of an in joke, people in the industry know that some of the things are true in the way you do them and some of the things were just us having fun, for example the band having their hands moved by the green men is completely false, that would never happen but, there was something in that as well about the whole manufacturing of bands. All the people that make the music behind the scenes are erased, you never know who they are and then you’ve got this one person that comes and sings the song and you think that’s the artist but what are they really, they’re just the front man.
HOT CHIP – OVER & OVER (video)
Jamie T was another artist I’d built up a relationship with having done his first video, which was the first video I’d done after ‘Over & Over’ Hot Chip. We got on really well and I’ve done 4 videos for Jamie T now, including ‘Calm Down Dearest’. The idea was Jamie’s at home having been out and he’s maybe a little bit drunk and he’s at home filming himself having fun like you do, like you do? Who does that?! (laughs) Jamie does that. Basically lots of weird things start happening in the house so I thought it would be nice if it looked really organic, if you get the effects to look really good but it’s so low-fi it that it would work really well. And this little dwarf character that comes out is kind of like the gremlin in your head or whatever, I wanted that character to be the person that messes with you.
We built his flat in a studio, we went and measured his flat and rebuilt it. It was amazing, when he walked in and sat on his couch having left his couch at home an hour before and he was like ‘this is nuts’….It was quite an interesting moment showing the offline to the label, it was so authentic and looked so real like Jamie’s flat and it looks like Jamie had filmed it himself so it kind of looked quite cheap (laughs) so, I think the label had a problem with that. But in my defence I said ‘well that’s perfect’ how else would you get those real organic effects like a wall going in and out, a window sliding up, how would you do that and make it look that good?
JAMIE T – CALM DOWN DEAREST (video)
Interviewer: Is there a Nima style?
Probably not. The next project I do I want to be excited about it in more than one way, I want to do something I haven’t done before and each thing to be a challenge you know. There’s no structure, I don’t do want I did in my last video, my shot lists and my story boards, it’s all new again and I’m freaking out the night before thinking about it which is all great.
With Lily I was suddenly given this opportunity to do a video for someone that’s a very high profile. That was quite an intense shoot because pre-production we had about 6 days and it was my biggest video ever. It was an idea that stemmed from the lyrics really which is what a lot of videos should do, so for me the challenge was presenting that in a really interesting way so this wipe that goes across and follows her only, you could be really funny with that, like the whole business men turning into tramps in the park.
Some of the shots are locked off so we just re-dress the same place twice which is so time consuming, so we dressed the whole scene with flowers here, hanging baskets there, fun happy people here… So we’d shoot that as a plate with Lily walking through, then we’d do a plate where we made it look even worse, loads of rubbish.
I’d spoken to Lily and said you should be in the record shop looking around and you should maybe ask for this record, you know, it wasn’t set in stone what she had to say and she goes ‘I know what I’ll say, I’ll say have you got…’ and she just ran off this whole list and didn’t stop. It was perfect it really worked and got her character across. That’s really important, that the artists come across the way they want to and giving them input to help them do that is going to help you in the long run.
LILY ALLEN – LDN Video
Some ideas when you’re writing a treatment are kind of like ‘what’s going to happen?’ so then from that, you break it down into the pre-production. Whereas some ideas are more about a feeling that you are getting across which you then need to go and research a little bit, then do your drawings or storyboards, things like that. When you’ve got the ideas that are pretty much already developed within the treatment, a week is not bad, you can get that done and shoot the video in a week. When it’s the other kind of idea though you find you’re really struggling and really up all hours going a bit mad.
With Maximo Park, the video for ‘Our Velocity’ I knew it had to be fast paced, it had to be upbeat, this kind of frenetic cutting, you know the edit had to be fast. That was my base thought, I was thinking around that and what I thought would be great would be to show the edit without editing and sort of orchestrate or co-ordinate the band members to be in the right places at the right time as the camera is moving around so we don’t actually have to do an edit, we can edit in camera.
You plan out your path that the camera is going to take but you have to work out who you want where so that also dictates the path that the camera should take, so you’re working with those two things, trying to get them perfect. The camera comes round here and then needs to pan a bit round there so we need the drummer there now, then we go round the drummer we need to now see the bass player but we need to be a little bit close up for example. It’s a bit like the roller coaster ride, think of the camera as the roller coaster you know it goes up and does it’s thing then comes back to the beginning...but it was a ride.
MAXIMO PARK – OUR VELOCITY (video clip)
My latest project that I’m in the middle of right now is Mark Ronson, featuring Lily Allen and it’s a cover of the Kaiser Chiefs song ‘Oh My God’. I wanted to reference the movie ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ and basically I knew that we couldn’t have Lily in the video so, that obviously led to the Jessica Rabbit type character that Lily’s gonna be and it’s just kind of funny but kind of cool and has really nice tones. The Lily character is still cheeky and she interacts with the live action that happens.
For me I’m always looking around at interesting things or trying to do interesting things so I have loads of ideas in my sketch book that I occasionally look back at and that happened to be an idea I had in my sketchbook, that I had written - would be great to do a Roger Rabbit, something like that and this was the perfect thing for it, sometimes it just happens that way.
MARK RONSON FT. LILY ALLEN – OH MY GOD (video)
I think it’s an incredibly exciting place, London and right now it is really exciting, there’s so many good bands that are popping up every day and the bands that are still around are putting out good stuff so it’s great for people like us. There’s nothing more exciting than being sent a great song and thinking ‘I can’t wait to just try and get ideas for this song’.
