http://bit.ly/1ZL5cUs
http://bit.ly/1ZL5cUv
http://bit.ly/1ZL5cUy
http://bit.ly/1ZL5cUz
Electronic Shaman: A Chat with Music Video Director and Photographer Tim Saccenti
To see more of Tim’s work, check out @timsaccenti on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.
In a cozy Brooklyn studio, Tim Saccenti (@timsaccenti) stalks past a vast collection of art books, cameras and editing equipment on a mission to grab just the right laser.
“Every few months, there’s some crazy new breakthrough [in technology],” says Tim. “It gets further and further away from traditional photography. I think what people still need is that person to tell the story — the director to push it into something that’s emotional, or matches symbiotically with the musician.”
That’s where Tim comes in. Once a fashion photo intern, he has spent the past decade and a half building a reputation as one of the best conceptual music video directors and portraiture artists in the business. Always a music fan, he saw a lack of sharp, high-production output in the New York City scene. He wanted to bring an artful edge to the creators around him. To get started, he tapped into his existing friendships with LCD Soundsystem and the DFA label crew.
“I learned how to sculpt a video from images, which was a very difficult process before there were YouTube tutorials about everything in the world,” he says, laughing.
For his first video, in 2007, he constructed a clear box for the band Battles to perform their single, “Atlas,” in. However, the group insisted that they plug in their instruments and perform the song live. They played it over and over again for 12 hours, while the sound loudly reverberated inside the plastic casing. Though Tim filmed it in HD, no computer existed at the time to host the final product. So he saved the original tapes, and three months ago, finished a two-year project to rebuild the entire video frame by frame.
“The way those guys play, the instruments have all those little details on them. You see them twiddling all the nobs and stuff,” he says. “To me what’s fun to watch in a video like that, you have some muscle memory connection to the band performing. The more you see, the more it kind of takes you over.”
As technology has improved, Tim’s bag of tools has evolved. His experimental, mood-based approach yields varying results of surrealistic expression. Sometimes it’s bold colors in stark contrast, other times it’s black and white and warped all over.
“The process is 90 percent of what makes the project interesting,” says Tim. “You start with a project not knowing how it’s going to end, especially if you’re doing music photography or music videos, because you have to deal with all the different personalities. Those personalities start coming out through the process, and that adds to what you’re doing.”
Each project starts with a distinct palette of colors and textures derivative of the sound of the song and the style of the musician. His videos react in tune with the composition — every new scene or element coming in, cutting out and changing. He’s looking to balance the artist’s emotion and to create a sonic landscape for the viewer to explore.
“I don’t just put somebody against a white wall and say ‘Here’s your picture, put this Supreme hoodie on,’” he says. “We try and really get into the details of, synesthetically, what’s the right tonality to have, whether it’s everything should be wavy or everything should be blocky. You can ask yourself those questions every step of the process.”
That process has helped Tim turn Travis Scott into a gray-scale monster for Complex magazine, create abstract crimson-red album artwork for Flying Lotus and develop a new visual identity for a band like Depeche Mode (which turns out to mean finding the perfectly acoustic dilapidated church).
“I do really appreciate it when people are obsessive-compulsive about details,” he says. “I’m more obsessive about trying to make something that hasn’t been seen before.”
—Kat Bein for Instagram @music
by via Instagram Blog
Posts
No comments: