Channel 4 'Mirrorball' ·· 30.05.1999 Chris Cunningham: With me it's purely reacting with the sound, I find that it's sound that activates my imagination, I spent my entire childhood laying by my dad's speakers listening to music, with my eye's closed picturing things, so I've almost got a library of connections that my brain makes with sound. With music videos It's like 50% coming up with the idea and 50% trying to do it as well as you can in a very limited amount of time you have. I love whatever limitations come with the job, basically, I think it's because I spent a good 10 years working in film as a technician for other directors. I almost learnt to work like in the confines, within restrictions, I sort of get off on it. For me being given utter freedom can sometimes be hard place to start, it's hard to get up and running. The dark thing is something that only other people pick up on, it's certainly not my idea of dark , I look at my work and don't think it's dark at all. The first Aphex Twin video I think really, depending on if you know the Aphex Twin and you have heard his music, you are going to find it funny. It's lots of kids running around with Richards face on, but if you don't know who the Aphex Twin is it's a bunch of fucking horrible looking kids. Laura Kanerick - head of music videos, Academy: Chris is really special perhaps it's because he came from a special effects background. Aphex Twin was defiantly a seminal peace for him. He's just got the most amazing talent and comes up with fantastic ideas and executes them beautifully, and has that edge that everybody so wants. Chris: About '95 I switched from using one half of my brain to the other. When I was a kid I was really interested in any thing technical, I was interested in craftsmanship behind things. Even though I enjoyed watching film, more than anything else I was interested in finding out how it was done. I got into the film industry without any ambitions of being a film maker of having anything artistic to say, but more with the intention of finding out how things are put together and how things work. The first person I worked for was Clive Barker, I worked at Spitting Image for a while doing engineering and sculpting and then worked on Alien 3. I worked for Danny Canon on Judge Dread and then went to work for Stanley Kubrick. I wanted to improve my drawing so spent time working in comics. With comics you have do things so they jump out of the page and get your attention. I suppose there might be some relationships to do music videos, because that is the problem with them, you do have a short period of time. Michel Gondry: He has a way to edit the image and the music, it makes you feel the music has been made here to illustrate the image and it's not the case. Chris: The edits are the main thing to me, that's what everything revolves around because with a music video. The pace if you are into edits, then so much of what you are going to have to do is already laid down for you. On Squarepusher and the latest Aphex video I edited myself, they were two videos I really wanted to see how far I could push. I make a big chart, a bit like a music with all the timings events on it. Dawn Shadforth: The video (re. Come on my selector) is choreographed so that sounds co-inside with sounds in the track the way the track is cut up in certain ways to allow the story to develop. Chris: Once I have used that to work out exactly what's going to happen and where, I then break that up into storyboards. The thing about putting beginnings on them and making them into films is normally something that gets expanded on a shoot. For example with the Windowlicker video the intention was that the two guys were going to start with them just pulling up and having a few words and then get blasted out the way. The guys were making me laugh so much that there was so much material coming out, it was a case of holding the camera on them to get more coverage and before you know it you have got a scene you can cut together. I certainly am into humour as I'm into esoteric subject matter, it seemed like the right track then again Come to Daddy was meant to be quite funny, but it didn't work. So I thought this time I will go out my way to make it definitely a piss take. It is probably quite spiteful as well, I've got a quite spiteful sense of humor. Taking the piss out of that genera of video, Hip Hop and R&B videos was defiantly on the agenda. Casting that ( Windowlicker ) was a case of being sent by Fed Ex tapes on a daily basis of girls shaking their bums into the camera, it was a case of watching the tapes late at night so I didn't have to feel embarrassed in the office. With someone like Madonna it has to concentrate mainly around her performance and how she comes across, and so that's what I focussed on. How it looked and how she looked. Dawn Shadforth: It's a very interesting look, a very different kind of grade and seeing Madonna in a way you have not seen her before. She's some sort of witch coming out of the desert. Chris: The video for Portishead is my favorite one because it's closest I've come to achieving what I had in my head when I first listened to the track. Dawn Shadforth: It's just a really beautiful concept that's really beautifully executed. Because it was shot under water they spent a very long time maticulously painting out bubbles that were coming out of peoples noses and mouths. Chris: It wasn't about them being in water, that was just a devise to make it feel other worldly. Dawn Shadforth: Chris is well known for is work that is more on the edge, the techno, the more extreme ideas of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher but Portishead is as much as what his work is about which is beautiful and poetic. Chris: I definitely think that with Bjork, she is one of the few artists who you can play around with their image and get away with it, she doesn't mind, and seems to benefit from being a chameleon like that. I was definitely aware of that at the beginning, thinking don't do anything too straight because this is one of the opportunities where you can away with it. On one hand you have got an artist that wants to be in the video and is also leftfield in the direction she can go in. What we are doing with the Bjork video is giving the impression that she is playing this artificial intelligence almost as being pieced together during the coarse of the song. Preparing for some wired mating ritual, Karma Sutra meets industrial robotics. She actually sent me these books of the ancient Karma Sutra drawings, the main essence of them is about sexual penetration, I couldn't work out a way of getting into the brief. I then realised that for years I had been obsessed with robots and used to design them for people, so I thought it would be a good way of doing something pornographic, no that's not true, not something pornographic something sexy, suggestive with that sex aspect, without it being un-showable. We are doing it in three different ways, one is building these robots, that are a close to the original design a possible and then filming them on set and then taking parts of the robot away and putting Bjork in to do her performance, treating that as another element. As well as that we are constructing the model robot in the computer so that can be tracked to match her movements, her performance. It's not some dramatic effect it is a very subtle, simple thing, so it looks like this robot is very quietly singing to itself. The track is very tranquil so the pictures are trying to suit the sound.