The Maccabees 'Something Like Happiness' by Joe Connor
Cat Velez - 22nd June 2015
The second instalment in the music video trilogy by Joe Connor for The Maccabees' soon-to-be-released new album, Marks To Prove It –  and following on from the video for the album's title track – picks up where the last one left off, following the same city-dweller in Elephant and Castle.
However the look and atmosphere of Connor's video for Something Like Happiness is quite different: this usually unlovely part of south London has changed, turning into a beautifully attenuated landscape of brilliant white and subdued blues - the result of using infra-red film.
"This shoot was about taking something brutal and domineering and turning it into something soft and beautiful, to look at something seen every day, with new eyes," says Adam Scarth, the video's DoP. "Infra-red was the ideal tool for this, it allowed us to see a spectrum of light that we don’t usually see."
JOSEPH CONNOR:
"In our last video we left our character emerging from a puddle, now we see him walking out into a bright light and up into a utopic Elephant and Castle. Throughout this whole collaboration The Maccabees main point was to make the mundane seem amazing, the grotesque beautiful and the forgotten prominent. It's a theme that permeates their whole album and in this video I was desperate to focus on the beauty that can be found in a much-derided area.Â
"These are places where people live, families have grown and nature very much has a part to play in the landscape dominated by concrete and high rises. Myself, Matt Clyde, Adam Scarth and all at MPC busted chops to create these images, each frame with a specifically chosen aspect ratio to give the most beautifully perfect representation of the area. Everything you see in these images is really there, nothing is added, it all exists, we just had to look at it differently."
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Cat Velez - 22nd June 2015
Credits
Production/Creative
- Director
- JC
- Producer
- Matt Clyde
- Production Company
- Chief Productions
- Executive Producer
- Colin Offland
- Production Manager
- Kate Brady
Camera
- Director of Photography
- Adam Scarth
- Focus Puller
- Malte Huebner
Wardrobe
- Make-up
- Kristen Basset
Editorial
- Editor
- Ian McLaughlin
Grading
- Colourist
- Kai Van Beers
- Colour grade company
- MPC
VFX
Agent
- Director's Representation
- AH
Commission
- Commissioner
- CS
- Label
- Fiction
Misc
- Camera Trainee
- Jack Green
- DIT
- Jon White
- Assistant Editor
- Katie Walters
- VFX Director
- Andy Galloway
Cat Velez - 22nd June 2015