Emmeline Pidgen

Amelia’s Magazine | Future Beauty at the Barbican: Beauty Party

by

Illustration by Lesley Barnes

Illustration by Maria del Carmen Smith

Illustration by Kelly Angood

Illustration by Joana Faria

Illustration by Abby Wright

Illustration by Antonia Parker

Illustration by Lesley Barnes

Justine Picard is a journalist for the Telegraph and an author who produces both fiction and non fiction, look for the last 13 years her side project has been researching Coco Chanel. Picard opened her talk on the publication of her Chanel Biography with the statement that the V&A is the heart of Fashion, this forget Topshop!

Coco Chanel the name synonymous with French fashion, so carefully cultivated by Karl Largerfield, he feels as if a caretaker at the same time as being an innovative fashion designer such is the call of the Chanel Staples. Each catwalk is a reinvention of the tweeds, the stars, the numbers, simplistic beauty is what Chanel conjures and it is what it achieves.

So of course how could I pass up the opportunity to listen to JP who has spent the last 13 years researching the life of perhaps the most well known, but least known fashion designer?

It was the perfect talk – full of teasers about what the book contained alongside interesting insights into Coco’s design aesthetic – the monestry where she grew up the walls were embedded with stars, similar to what would later feature in her designs.

A talented speaker from the start, Justine enraptured the audience with tales of Chanel’s rise from rags to riches polevaulting through French Society’s conventions that those born in a certain place – should stay on the rung of society they were born. Luckily, not only for Haute Couture but for Women everywhere Chanel made ignoring social conventions a habit of a lifetime.

Illustration by Maria del Carmen Smith

Not for Chanel the corsets of early 1900′s France – no, the most striking thing about Chanel was seeing the pictures of her in a style that has inudated our subconscious – from the wearing of trousers to single handily popularising the Breton Stripe. Most importantly Chanel was an avid wearer of the flat show – not for her the gravity defying, walk preventing spindly heels that seem so popular not only on the catwalk but that shop which nestles within the heart of Oxford Street, Topshop.

Illustration by Kelly Angood

“Fashion is very dark, what we wear is what we cover up” Coco Chanel

JP covered the usual ground her relationship with Boy Capell and the Duke of Westminister, revealing a photograph of Coco and Winston Churchill lead her to the ministery of archives… what did she find? Sadly that was left to be revealed in the pages of her boo

Illustration by Joana Faria

Illustration by Abby Wright

Illustration by Antonia Parker

Illustration by Lesley Barnes

Justine Picard is a journalist for the Telegraph and an author who produces both fiction and non fiction, shop for the last 13 years her side project has been researching Coco Chanel. Picard opened her talk on the publication of her Chanel Biography with the statement that the V&A is the heart of Fashion, information pills forget Topshop!

Coco Chanel the name synonymous with French fashion, so carefully cultivated by Karl Largerfield, he feels as if a caretaker at the same time as being an innovative fashion designer such is the call of the Chanel Staples. Each catwalk is a reinvention of the tweeds, the stars, the numbers, simplistic beauty is what Chanel conjures and it is what it achieves.

So of course how could I pass up the opportunity to listen to JP who has spent the last 13 years researching the life of perhaps the most well known, but least known fashion designer?

Illustration by Maria del Carmen Smith – An aside about this image, notice how Chanel sits on the horse in jodphurs, rather than side saddle, a fairly political statement at a time when most women were bound in corsets, forcing them to sit side saddle.

It was the perfect talk – full of teasers about what the book contained alongside interesting insights into Coco’s design aesthetic – the monestry where she grew up the walls were embedded with stars, similar to what would later feature in her designs.

A talented speaker from the start, Justine enraptured the audience with tales of Chanel’s rise from rags to riches polevaulting through French Society’s conventions that those born in a certain place – should stay on the rung of society they were born. Luckily, not only for Haute Couture but for Women everywhere Chanel made ignoring social conventions a habit of a lifetime.

Illustration by Kelly Angood

“Fashion is very dark, what we wear is what we cover up” Coco Chanel

Not for Chanel the corsets of early 1900′s France – no, the most striking thing about Chanel was seeing the pictures of her in a style that has inudated our subconscious – from the wearing of trousers to single handily popularising the Breton Stripe. Most importantly Chanel was an avid wearer of the flat show – not for her the gravity defying, walk preventing spindly heels that seem so popular not only on the catwalk but that shop which nestles within the heart of Oxford Street, Topshop.

Illustration by Joana Faria

JP covered the usual ground her relationship with Boy Capell and the Duke of Westminister, revealing a photograph of Coco and Winston Churchill lead her to the ministery of archives… what did she find? Sadly that was left to be revealed in the pages of her book – but let’s just say her reported relationship with a German Soldier may not have been what it has so far appeared to be the work of a traitor, but a (slightly naive…) plan between Coco and Winston Churchill to bring the war to an early end. This may seem rather glib, but to find out more, we will all have to read the book…

Illustration by Abby Wright

Picard touched upon the inclusions of the number 5 etc and the use of stars… magical numbers were part of Chanel’s magical thinking… Tarot Cards. Chanel was interested in simple beauty. Justine attributes this magical thinking to her time spent as a child growing up in an ancient monastery, suggesting that the epoynmous chanel star was inspired by the mosiac’s made by Medieval Monks…

Illustration by Antonia Parker

Chanel was funded by Boy Capell, the man sitting on the horse in the above illustration, as soon as the Fashion House started to make money, Chanel paid every last penny back. From the start Coco was to be an independent women. Justine Picard described fashion as “a series of Hauntings” and finished the talk with a wish for a book on the continuation of Chanel by Karl Largerfield, to conclude that such a book could only be written once Largerfield had left Chanel and quite possibly this planet…

Illustration by Lesley Barnes

Coco Chanel the name synonymous with French fashion, discount so carefully cultivated by Karl Largerfield, side effects he feels as if a caretaker at the same time as being an innovative fashion designer such is the call of the Chanel Staples. Each catwalk is a reinvention of the tweeds, the stars, the numbers, simplistic beauty is what Chanel conjures and it is what it achieves.

Justine Picard is a journalist for the Telegraph and an author who produces both fiction and non fiction, for the last 13 years her side project has been researching Coco Chanel. Picard opened her talk on the publication of her Chanel Biography with the statement that the V&A is the heart of Fashion, forget Topshop!

How could I pass up the opportunity to find out more about this ever present, but ever distant fashion designer? Especially as I am yet to watch either of the recent films made about her early life…

Illustration by Maria del Carmen Smith – An aside about this image, notice how Chanel sits on the horse in jodphurs, rather than side saddle, a fairly political statement at a time when most women were bound in corsets, forcing them to sit side saddle.

It was the perfect talk – full of teasers about what the book contained alongside interesting insights into Coco’s design aesthetic – the monestry where she grew up the walls were embedded with stars, similar to what would later feature in her designs.

A talented speaker from the start, Justine enraptured the audience with tales of Chanel’s rise from rags to riches polevaulting through French Society’s conventions that those born in a certain place – should stay on the rung of society they were born. Luckily, not only for Haute Couture but for Women everywhere Chanel made ignoring social conventions a habit of a lifetime.

Illustration by Kelly Angood

“Fashion is very dark, what we wear is what we cover up” Coco Chanel

Not for Chanel the corsets of early 1900′s France – no, the most striking thing about Chanel was seeing the pictures of her in a style that has inudated our subconscious – from the wearing of trousers to single handily popularising the Breton Stripe. Most importantly Chanel was an avid wearer of the flat show – not for her the gravity defying, walk preventing spindly heels that seem so popular not only on the catwalk but that shop which nestles within the heart of Oxford Street, Topshop.

Illustration by Joana Faria

JP covered the usual ground her relationship with Boy Capell and the Duke of Westminister, revealing a photograph of Coco and Winston Churchill lead her to the ministery of archives… what did she find? Sadly that was left to be revealed in the pages of her book – but let’s just say her reported relationship with a German Soldier may not have been what it has so far appeared to be the work of a traitor, but a (slightly naive…) plan between Coco and Winston Churchill to bring the war to an early end. This may seem rather glib, but to find out more, we will all have to read the book…

Illustration by Abby Wright

Picard touched upon the inclusions of the number 5 etc and the use of stars… magical numbers were part of Chanel’s magical thinking… Tarot Cards. Chanel was interested in simple beauty. Justine attributes this magical thinking to her time spent as a child growing up in an ancient monastery, suggesting that the epoynmous chanel star was inspired by the mosiac’s made by Medieval Monks…

Illustration by Antonia Parker

Chanel was funded by Boy Capell, the man sitting on the horse in the above illustration, as soon as the Fashion House started to make money, Chanel paid every last penny back. From the start Coco was to be an independent women. Justine Picard described fashion as “a series of Hauntings” and finished the talk with a wish for a book on the continuation of Chanel by Karl Largerfield, to conclude that such a book could only be written once Largerfield had left Chanel and quite possibly this planet…

Illustration by Lesley Barnes

Coco Chanel the name synonymous with French fashion, order so carefully cultivated by Karl Largerfield, this he feels as if a caretaker at the same time as being an innovative fashion designer such is the call of the Chanel Staples. Each catwalk is a reinvention of the tweeds, the stars, the numbers, simplistic beauty is what Chanel conjures and it is what it achieves.

Justine Picard is a journalist for the Telegraph and an author who produces both fiction and non fiction, for the last 13 years her side project has been researching Coco Chanel. Picard opened her talk on the publication of her Chanel Biography with the statement that the V&A is the heart of Fashion, forget Topshop!

How could I pass up the opportunity to find out more about this ever present, but ever distant fashion designer? Especially as I am yet to watch either of the recent films made about her early life…

Illustration by Maria del Carmen Smith – An aside, notice how Chanel sits on the horse in jodphurs, rather than side saddle, a fairly political statement at a time when most women were bound in corsets, forcing them to sit side saddle.

It was the perfect talk – full of teasers about what the book contained alongside interesting insights into Coco’s design aesthetic – the monestry where she grew up the walls were embedded with stars, similar to what would later feature in her designs.

A talented speaker from the start, Justine enraptured the audience with tales of Chanel’s rise from rags to riches polevaulting through French Society’s conventions that those born in a certain place – should stay on the rung of society they were born. Luckily, not only for Haute Couture but for Women everywhere Chanel made ignoring social conventions a habit of a lifetime.

Illustration by Kelly Angood

“Fashion is very dark, what we wear is what we cover up” Coco Chanel

Not for Chanel the corsets of early 1900′s France – no, the most striking thing about Chanel was seeing the pictures of her in a style that has inudated our subconscious – from the wearing of trousers to single handily popularising the Breton Stripe. Most importantly Chanel was an avid wearer of the flat show – not for her the gravity defying, walk preventing spindly heels that seem so popular not only on the catwalk but that shop which nestles within the heart of Oxford Street, Topshop.

Illustration by Joana Faria

JP covered the usual ground her relationship with Boy Capell and the Duke of Westminister, revealing a photograph of Coco and Winston Churchill lead her to the ministery of archives… what did she find? Sadly that was left to be revealed in the pages of her book – but let’s just say her reported relationship with a German Soldier may not have been what it has so far appeared to be the work of a traitor, but a (slightly naive…) plan between Coco and Winston Churchill to bring the war to an early end. This may seem rather glib, but to find out more, we will all have to read the book…

Illustration by Abby Wright

Picard touched upon the inclusions of the number 5 etc and the use of stars… magical numbers were part of Chanel’s magical thinking… Tarot Cards. Chanel was interested in simple beauty. Justine attributes this magical thinking to her time spent as a child growing up in an ancient monastery, suggesting that the epoynmous chanel star was inspired by the mosiac’s made by Medieval Monks…

Illustration by Antonia Parker

Chanel was funded by Boy Capell, the man sitting on the horse in the above illustration, as soon as the Fashion House started to make money, Chanel paid every last penny back. From the start Coco was to be an independent women. Justine Picard described fashion as “a series of Hauntings” and finished the talk with a wish for a book on the continuation of Chanel by Karl Largerfield, to conclude that such a book could only be written once Largerfield had left Chanel and quite possibly this planet…

Illustration by Lesley Barnes

Coco Chanel the name synonymous with French fashion, order so carefully cultivated by Karl Largerfield, what is ed he feels as if a caretaker at the same time as being an innovative fashion designer such is the call of the Chanel Staples. Each catwalk is a reinvention of the tweeds, patient the stars, the numbers, simplistic beauty is what Chanel conjures and it is what it achieves.

Justine Picard is a journalist for the Telegraph and an author who produces both fiction and non fiction, for the last 13 years her side project has been researching Coco Chanel. Picard opened her talk on the publication of her Chanel Biography with the statement that the V&A is the heart of Fashion, forget Topshop!

Illustration by Joana Faria

How could I pass up the opportunity to find out more about this ever present, but ever distant fashion designer? Especially as I am yet to watch either of the recent films made about her early life…

It was the perfect talk – full of teasers about what the book contained alongside interesting insights into Coco’s design aesthetic – the monestry where she grew up the walls were embedded with stars, similar to what would later feature in her designs.

A talented speaker, Justine enraptured the audience with tales of Chanel’s rise from rags to riches polevaulting through French Society’s conventions that those born in a certain place – should stay on the rung of society they were born. Luckily, not only for Haute Couture but for women everywhere who wanted to wear trousers, Chanel made ignoring social conventions a habit of a lifetime.

Illustration by Kelly Angood

“Fashion is very dark, what we wear is what we cover up” Coco Chanel

Not for Chanel the corsets of early 1900′s France – no, the most striking thing about Chanel was seeing the pictures of her in a style that has inudated our subconscious – from the wearing of trousers to single handily popularising the Breton Stripe. Most importantly Chanel was an avid wearer of the flat show – not for her the gravity defying, walk preventing spindly heels that seem so popular not only on the catwalk but that shop which nestles within the heart of Oxford Street, Topshop.

Illustration by Maria del Carmen Smith – An aside, notice how Chanel sits on the horse in jodphurs, rather than side saddle, a fairly political statement at a time when most women were bound in corsets.

Chanel was funded by Boy Capell, the man in the above illustration, as soon as the Fashion House produced revenue, Chanel paid every last penny back. From the start Coco was to be an independent women.

Justine Picard covered the usual ground of Chanel’s relationship with men, starting with Boy Capell and touching upon her life spent fishing in Scotland with the Duke of Westminister. Through whom Coco met Winston Churchill in the early 1920′s. The discovery of a picture of the two together lead Picard to the ministery of war archives, specifically the archives on Winston Churchill to explore Chanel’s reported relationship with a German Soldier may not have been what has so far been reported, the work of a traitor, but a (slightly naive…) plan -devised perhaps by Coco and regaled to Winston Churchill- to bring the war to an early end. This may seem rather glib, but to find out more and the outcome of Picards trip to the archives? Sadly the author left this announcement within the pages of her book.

Illustration by Abby Wright

Picard touched upon the inclusions of the number 5 etc and the use of stars… magical numbers were part of Chanel’s magical thinking… Tarot Cards. Chanel was interested in simple beauty. Justine attributes this magical thinking to her time spent as a child growing up in an ancient monastery, suggesting that the epoynmous chanel star was inspired by the mosiac’s made by Medieval Monks…

Illustration by Antonia Parker

Justine Picard described fashion as “a series of Hauntings” and finished the talk with a wish for a book on the continuation of Chanel by Karl Largerfield, to conclude that such a book could only be written once Largerfield had left Chanel and quite possibly this planet…


WAH Nails, pills illustrated by Yelena Bryksenkova

Unless you’ve been under a rock, view you’ll have seen me banging on about Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion at the Barbican. I did a mammoth post about the exhibition last week; it’s one of my favourite fashion exhibitions ever, store and I couldn’t wait to go back for a second look.

So I was delighted to attend the Beauty Party last Thursday. The name flooded my mind with images of middle-aged women guzzling Lambrini and exchanging salacious stories while passing underwear around a living room on a cul-de-sac somewhere in Huddersfield. The roster of participants was pretty alluring, though – Alex Box, Charlie le Mindu and WAH Nails to name a few.


All photography by Matt Bramford

I went to a Viktor & Rolf event like this a couple of years back and it isn’t the easiest thing to navigate – you have to seek out the various special events – they’re usually tucked away. In tiny rooms behind the exhibition itself, each of the aficionados of beauty had set up their wares. Nails, make-up and hair were covered. What exactly was I going to get out of this? I have very little hair, I bite my nails, and I rarely wear make-up. ‘This is for girls,’ I thought to myself. Well, here’s a little round-up of the night’s events:

Charlie le Mindu

Illustration by Gemma Sheldrake

I’d subconsciously blocked Charlie le Mindu out of my mind after fashion week’s debacle. I feel lucky to be alive after that display, and I thought I had at least six months to recover before braving his (what will undoubtedly be fabulous) show for A/W 2011. Thankfully there wasn’t an arse or tit (or, er, y’know – the other bit) insight this time.

Charlie had created, especially for the occasion, a sculptural creation from human hair that descended from the roof and featured a rider’s helmet with a huge, yellow horse tail that dropped to the ground. On its own, it was beautiful; hanging motionless from the ceiling, it looked like magic. Attendees were able to slip underneath the creation and have their photograph taken, with hilarious results… Some were too short, some were too tall, some just couldn’t make it balance on their heads, but oh, what fun!


Look, it’s Amelia’s Magazine illustrator Naomi Law!


It’s Jenny, who isn’t an illustrator, but a friend nonetheless.

WAH Nails

I love how WAH Nails have single-handedly made nail art cool again. Their incredible designs have had so much press and attention since their debut in 2009. Most recently, they were part of the Eley Kishimoto Flash-On Week pop-up at the Shoreditch Studios, transforming nails with the iconic Flash pattern. Sadly, between the two of them, no matter how quickly the duo revamped nails it was clear the girls I’d gone with weren’t going to get a look in. The list to put your name on was full after fifteen minutes!

Still, it was fascinating to watch the designs come to life.

Alex Box

Illustration by Emmeline Pidgen

I’ve been a fan of Alex’s for a while but I wasn’t sure what to make of a make-up demonstration. A world-famous make-up artist demonstrating her skills in make-up at the front of a cinema, for an hour and a half? Oh, go on then I thought – what’s the worst that can happen? It turns out it was one of the most mesmerising things I (and my pals) had ever seen. Resplendent in a vintage floor-sweeping red frock and fashion glasses that would make half of Shoreditch envious, Alex began creating the first look to the sound of haunting classical music.

To see how quickly she works and how naturally it seems to flow was utterly hypnotising, and surprisingly relaxing. The first look was a Marie-Antoinette inspired ghostly creation, complete with a headpiece and fabrics that were added at the end – absolutely beautiful.

The same poor model then had her face wiped before Look Two began – a more playful look with vibrant colours and jazzy fabrics. ‘Sometimes you have to go against the rules,’ relayed Alex, to a room full of gripped onlookers. A truly wonderful experience.

Illamasqua

Illamasqua‘s team of make-up artists were on hand to provide makeovers. I couldn’t see much of what was going on here because a gaggle of excited teenage girls surrounded them in the hope of a dab of powder from one of these ‘world-famous’ experts. Nothing to see, here.

Of course amongst all this was a chance to see the incredible exhibition again, and it was equally as wonderful as the first time. I’d definitely recommend these evenings, and ooh look – there’s one tonight, starring Fred Butler amongst others!

See all the details here.

Written by Matt Bramford on Thursday October 28th, 2010 5:25 pm

Categories ,A/W 2011, ,Alex Box, ,barbican, ,Beauty Party, ,Charlie le Mindu, ,Eley Kishimoto, ,Emmeline Pidgen, ,fashion, ,Flash, ,Fred Butler, ,Future Beauty, ,Gemma Sheldrake, ,Hair, ,japanese, ,Make-up, ,Marie Antoinette, ,Nails, ,Viktor & Rolf, ,WAH Nails, ,Yelena Bryksenkova

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Amelia’s Magazine | What Emmeline Wore In October

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what-emmeline-wore-in-october-fashion-illustration-blog
This month I’ve challenged myself to draw my entire outfit for each day in October! ‘What Emmeline Wore In October’ is an illustrated take on ‘outfit of the day’ and ‘what I wore’ posts you so often see on fashion and lifestyle blogs.

what-emmeline-wore-in-october-day-17
what-emmeline-wore-in-october-illustration-day-28-x-joanie-clothing
As a freelance illustrator, I’m a huge advocate of daily illustration challenges, I think they’re really valuable in finding out what it is that you actually like to draw – as well as improving your illustration work, learning new techniques and kick-starting your motivation in all areas of your creativity.

what-emmeline-wore-in-october-illustration-day-24-x-joy-the-store
what-emmeline-wore-in-october-illustration-day-21-x-people-tree
I ran a Summer edition (What Emmeline Wore In July) last year and collaborated with some incredible brands like Boden, Orla Kiely and Cath Kidston on the project, and this year I’ve teamed up with the likes of Fat Face, Oasis and Joules to bring a bit of extra excitement to the project!

what-emmeline-wore-in-october-illustration-day-6
Any daily illustration challenge is tricky, it can be really hard to wake up at the weekend and realise you need to head to your computer to work, or wear something a little more presentable than pjs! But the benefits have definitely outweighed the occasional gruellingness of it, and I’ve had amazing support for the series so far.

You can find the full series of illustrations on my blog (www.emmelineillustration.blogspot.com) or by using the hashtag #wewio on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or Instagram where I’m @emmelinedraws.

About Emmeline:
Emmeline Pidgen is a freelance illustrator creating books, graphic novels, editorial and advertising illustration from a studio in the North West of England.

Written by Emmeline Pidgen on Thursday November 3rd, 2016 1:00 pm

Categories ,#wewio, ,@emmelinedraws, ,Boden, ,Cath Kidston, ,Emmeline Pidgen, ,Fat Face, ,Joules, ,Oasis, ,Orla Kiely, ,What Emmeline Wore In July, ,What Emmeline Wore In October

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Amelia’s Magazine | Museum of Everything: A Review of Exhibition #3

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Design Museum fashion talk by Leeay
Design Museum fashion talks Marc Jacobs A/W 2010, approved illustration by Leeay
Abi Daker The Museum of Everything
The Museum of Everything by Abigail Daker

Returning for the third time the Museum of Everything’s simply named Exhibition #3 has been put together with the help of British pop artist Sir Peter Blake. It only opened on the 13th October to coincide with the Frieze art fair and is due to close again at Christmas so get down there quick before it’s gone, page I promise you’d be sorry to miss it. A strange little place, the Museum of Everything can be found tucked away down a back street in Primose Hill next to the local library. However, although small in stature this curious museum will still require a good portion of your morning or afternoon to get round because every little space, spot, and shelf is covered with intriguing things to peer at.

themuseumofeverything by Emmeline Pidgen
Illustration by Emmeline Pidgen

Entering through the colourful striped doorway and paying a voluntary donation to a lady in a small kitsch ticket booth and you may be well on your way to guessing that the circus is the theme this time round. Indeed circus mirrors greet you, transforming you into a giant, a dwarf and…God forbid! Someone wider than they are tall! Apt then that round the corner is the ‘gallery of unusual people’ and the beginning of an interesting peek into the world of the carnival and the freak show. The gallery is a selection of historic sideshow memorabilia depicting everyone from bearded ladies and dwarves to a man with the completely smooth appearance (yes! including ‘downstairs’) and webbed feet of a frog. This vast collection of posters and postcards are a “celebration of difference” because “nobody’s perfect”, or at least that’s the idea as Sir Peter Blake himself explains in a video later on.

museumofeverything by emmeline pidgen
Snake Charmer by Emmeline Pidgen

Giant banners advertising, among other things, “strange little people”, and “the world’s most grotesque creature” are strewn all over the walls in the main hall. Painted by the so-called ‘king of the sideshow banner’, Fred Johnson, his is just one among the many all but defunct crafts that are revered at the Museum of Everything. There’s even a wardrobe door emblazoned with a leopard painted by sign painter Joe Ephgrave, who also painted the iconic drum skin on the award-winning cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album that Sir Peter Blake designed.

museum of everything
Girl by Ted Willcox

In fact that’s the really lovely thing about the Museum of Everything, iconic artworks are mixed in without fanfare among work from less known, brilliant, and usually eccentric artists’ – like the embroidery of Ted Willcox. Ted was taught to sew in hospital while recovering from injuries incurred in WW2. He then went on to spend the rest of his life indoors finding inspiration in everything from Alice in Wonderland to pictures of reclining bare-chested beauties, recreating them all in needle and thread.

Natasha-Thompson-Museum-of-Everything-Boxing-Squirrels
Squirrels Boxing by Natasha Thompson

In many ways the Museum can be viewed as a potted history of Great Britain, though told from a thoroughly left field point of view. Nothing sums this up better than the Walter Potter section, an example of Victoriana at its most bizarre if ever there was one. Cleary no relation to animal lover Beatrix, Walter Potter’s tableaux are made up of stuffed rabbits, a variety of birds, squirrels, rats, frogs, puppies and kittens – all in a surprising range of poses. They are completely grotesque but also fascinating, and of course, today taxidermy is very much back in vogue with artists like Polly Morgan picking up and popularising the ancient craft once again.

Walter Potter Rabbit School by Holly Trill
Walter Potter Rabbit School by Holly Trill

The Museum of Everything managed to impart on me the same kinds of feelings that I imagine may have flashed through the minds of the archaic freak show audience. A mix of morbid curiosity, delight in viewing the strange, and a childish excitement over being reminded what a beautiful and odd world we live in. Catch it while the circus is still in town!

Open Wednesday – Sunday, 10.30 am – 6.30 pm until Christmas. More information on the Museum of Everything website here, and don’t forget to check in with our review from their last show in 2009, which was just as wonderful.

Written by Emma Barlow on Thursday October 28th, 2010 9:43 am

Categories ,Abigail Daker, ,art, ,Banners, ,Carnival, ,Circus, ,Collections, ,embroidery, ,Emmeline Pidgen, ,Freak show, ,Fred Johnson, ,frieze, ,Holly Trill, ,Icon, ,Joe Ephgrave, ,Memorabilia, ,Museum of Everything, ,Natasha Thompson, ,Polly Morgan, ,Primrose Hill, ,Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, ,Side Show, ,Sign painting, ,Sir Peter Blake, ,Taxidermy, ,Ted Willcox, ,the beatles, ,Walter Potter

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Amelia’s Magazine | Halloween 2011: a Ghoulish Celebration of the Dead in Illustration

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Halloween by Karolina Burdon
Halloween by Karolina Burdon.

And so Halloween rolls around again! I’ve loved Halloween since I was a pre-teen, when I hosted annual parties for my schoolmates where I always dressed as a witch. We had apple bobbing and ‘guess the body part’ style games. (peeled grapes, cold spaghetti, jelly mashed up, etc…) Ever since then I have taken many an opportunity to dress up as a ghoul or a monster – especially during ‘night games’ hosted on Forest School Camps for children. I don’t know why, but I really relish spooking people out in the dark.

Halloween by Emmeline Pidgen
Halloween by Emmeline Pidgen.

More recently a few Amelia’s Magazine parties have conveniently coincided with this time of year – my second issue was memorably launched in the ancient disco room behind the George Tavern on Commercial Road, now boarded up. And a few years ago I went out on the town with a group of my interns – all of us sporting fake blood and fangs.

All Hallows Eve by Devin McGrath
All Hallows Eve by Devin McGrath.

I’ve just come back from Poland where the Americanised version of Halloween has yet to make a serious dent on traditions. All Saints’ Day on 1st November is a national holiday and families take the time to remember much loved relatives by placing flowers and candles on their graves. It’s a tradition I think we could do more of in the UK since we no longer seem to have much space to honour those we have lost. Instead Halloween (which has come from a combination of remembering our dead and a celebration of autumn) is merely a garish commercial opportunity. When I was little I had to make all of my own Halloween outfits and decorations, but in the past ten years I have noticed a huge increase in the amount of Halloween tat (and branded food) for sale come late October.

Halloween by Ada Jusic
Halloween by Ada Jusic.

Don’t get me wrong though, I still love Halloween even if I no longer have time to properly enjoy it myself. And I am going to make damned sure my child has the opportunity to dress up, play games and scare themselves and others senseless too. In the meantime, feast your eyes on these ghoulish illustrations.

Halloween Pumpkin by Jacqueline Valencia
Halloween Pumpkin by Jacqueline Valencia.

Sugar Skull by Jacqueline Valencia
Sugar Skull by Jacqueline Valencia.

Bacall SugarSkull Halloween by SarahJayneDraws
Brooks SugarSkull Halloween SarahJayneDraws
garbo by Sarah Jayne morris
Halloween Sugar Skulls by Sarah Jayne Draws aka Sarah Jayne Morris.

Halloween by Estelle Morris
Halloween by Estelle Morris.

.

Written by Amelia Gregory on Monday October 31st, 2011 2:49 pm

Categories ,Ada Jusic, ,All Saints’ Day, ,Devin McGrath, ,Emmeline Pidgen, ,Estelle Morris, ,Forest School Camps, ,Ghouls, ,Hallowe’en, ,illustration, ,Jacqueline Valencia, ,Karolina Burdon, ,October, ,poland, ,Pumpkins, ,Sarah Jayne Morris, ,SarahJayneDraws, ,Sugar Skull, ,Witches

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Amelia’s Magazine | Christmas Gift Ideas 2012: Best Books for Friends & Family

by

Sanna Annukka The Fir Tree
It’s here! For my final round up of gift ideas I take a look at a selection of books to give your loved ones for Christmas. You’re sure to find something that will suit in this little lot… possibly even for yourself.

Sanna Annukka The Fir Tree
Sanna Annukka The Fir Tree

Best for lovers of illustration:
Finnish/English illustrator Sanna Annukka rose to prominence when she created the famous Under the Iron Sea album cover for Keane in 2006. Her heavily decorative style is instantly recognisable and her newest work, inspired by totems, is included in my round up of best prints for Christmas. Now she has illustrated the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale The Fir Tree, the story of how a small sapling is so anxious to reach maturity that he misses the best part of the present. It’s an ancient fable which is beautifully retold in Sanna‘s inimitable patterned illustrations, and all bound together in a fabulous fabric book with a very special gold foiled cover.

Kaffe Fasset Dreaming in Colour 3
Kaffe Fasset Dreaming in Colour 3
Kaffe Fasset Dreaming in Colour 3

Best for lovers of craft:
Anyone who loves colourful intarsia knits or modern patchwork quilts will be familiar with the work of Kaffe Fassett, who moved to this country from California many decades ago to pursue a career as a painter, and subsequently revolutionised contemporary craft. He was particularly popular in the 1980s, when he influenced a whole generation of crafters (including me), and now he’s put his extraordinary story down in print. The book’s publication chimes perfectly with a major retrospective at the Fashion and Textile Museum, which will take place from 22 March – 29 June next year.

Sylvester and the New Year Emmeline Pidgen
Sylvester and the New Year Emmeline Pidgen
Sylvester and the New Year Emmeline Pidgen

Best for children:
Sylvester and the New Year is a seasonal story that is a bit different form the usual fare, featuring a bearded old man that you might not be so familiar with. The book is based on a traditional folk tale from the continent, where Saint Sylvester wakes only to ensure the old year finishes and the New Year arrives. Emmeline Pidgen‘s beautiful illustrations tell this story in a way that will appeal to young children wonderfully.

Home Baked book Hanne Risgaard
Home Baked book Hanne Risgaard
Home Baked book Hanne Risgaard

Best for cooks:
Baking it seems, is all the rage. And everywhere I turn I bump up against yet another review for a book about cakes, or bread. But what to do for the person who already knows how to do all of usual stuff? Who wants a book a little different to those lining the shelves of our high street stores? Well, I’ve got just the ticket – Home Baked – an absolutely beautiful tome about artisanal Scandinavian baking. The timing couldn’t be better, what with our current obsession about all things Danish. This scrumptious book by organic farmer Hanne Risgaard is chock full of beautiful photographs and techniques for creating unusual nordic breads and pastries. And if you give the gift maybe you’ll get to try the outcome…

Cause and Effect Gestalten
Cause and Effect Gestalten
Cause and Effect Gestalten

Best for ethical designers:
After weeks and months of torrential rain it’s a wonder that climate change is still so far down the agenda: it shouldn’t be. We need to be talking about why extreme weather events are harassing our planet, and we need to be taking action, which is where the work of designers comes in. Designers and illustrators play an extremely important part in telling the stories that must persuade humans to change their ways. Cause and Effect: Visualising Sustainability, is a timely collection of inspiring graphics. It also happens to include the poster I created in collaboration with Mia Overgaard for Climate Camp a few years ago.

The Roundel cover
The Roundel cover

Best for Londoners:
Everyone knows the iconography of London’s tube: the Roundel must be one of the most recognisable emblems around the world. Now a new book documents the creations of a host of famous artists who were challenged with the task of reinterpreting the sign. Amongst recognisable renditions of the roundel are images that mutate it beyond recognition, lose it in patterns or adopt a humorous approach. The Roundel is perfect for anyone who loves London and it’s sometimes irascible underground system, and it is now available as a deluxe clothbound edition.

Where's Mo? by Harry Bloom
Where's Mo? by Harry Bloom
Where's Mo? by Harry Bloom

Best for sports nuts:
No one can have escaped coverage of the Olympics this summer, and now Harry Bloom, a talented young illustration graduate whom I discovered at the shows last year, has taken on the theme with this fun puzzle book – Where’s Mo? – which features illustrations of a selection of great British sporting events in which Mo Farrah and other sporting friends are hidden. Can you find them in the crowds?

Written by Amelia Gregory on Friday December 21st, 2012 10:46 am

Categories ,2012, ,Baking, ,Book Review, ,Cause and Effect: Visualising Sustainability, ,Climate Camp, ,Danish, ,Emmeline Pidgen, ,Fashion and Textile Museum, ,Folk Tale, ,gifts, ,Hanne Risgaard, ,Hans Christian Andersen, ,Harry Bloom, ,Home Baked, ,Kaffe Fassett, ,Keane, ,Mia Overgaard, ,Mo Farrah, ,Olympics, ,Roundel, ,Saint Sylvester, ,Sanna Annukka, ,Scandinavian, ,Sylvester and the New Year, ,The Fir Tree, ,The Roundel, ,Under the Iron Sea, ,Where’s Mo?

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Amelia’s Magazine | A post Tin Tabernacle interview with Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou

by

Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, side effects the director of her recent videos, sildenafil to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, drug the director of her recent videos, hospital to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson.

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
TM AND HL-Jan 11-photography by Amelia Gregory
Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, viagra dosage all photography by Amelia Gregory.

Last week Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou held a preview screening for their Tin Tabernacle tour video, viagra sale titled 11 Nights Under Tin. I caught up with them at Bush Hall a few weeks ago to find out more about this talented couple.

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia GregoryTrevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

The Tin Tabernacle tour followed on from Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou’s Village Hall tour of last year. To pull it off they found approximately fifty churches through the Tin Tabernacles website, got details of about thirty of them and managed to stage concerts in eleven of them. The website often listed the nearest town or they enterprisingly zoomed in on the google street view: sometimes a contact number would be visible on a noticeboard, and at other times they phoned the local pub. Most people were really enthusiastic, but some were overwhelmed by the idea and worried by the commitment. “We wanted to get out into the community and play for people who don’t have much access to music,” they told me when I spoke to them at Bush Hall. “We went to those who were keen.” It seems to have been a successful venture: the audiences were mostly comprised of locals.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

The Tin Tabernacle churches all vary in size, though they have a few things in common. They are all made of corrugated iron, and were invented circa 1840, when the scattering of God fearing British citizens across the British Empire hastened the need for an easily transportable place of worship. Mining communities sprung up in all sorts of remote corners of the globe so the churches often had to be carried for long distances overland. “They warm up fast because they are wooden clad inside,” explained Trevor and Hannah, “but some had no electricity so we played by candlelight.” The smallest church held only about 40 people, all squashed into the pews, but the average capacity was between 70-120. What with Trevor, Hannah and their two support acts it was still quite a squish.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

I spotted a tin church on my visit to the Cornish village of Cadgwith earlier this year, but sadly this was not one that they managed to include on the tour, despite Trevor’s Cornish heritage. Many were nevertheless located in amazing locations, including on cliff tops.


11 Nights Under Tin, a film by Trevor Moss, can be watched in full above.

Why did they chose such an innovative way of touring? “We had toured the same venues for years and they are all the same, painted black inside.” Trevor and Hannah hope that with their Arts Council funded tours their audiences will experience an event, instead of just standing in the shadows. “It’s no wonder that so many bands’ later records are rubbish when they live in such a strange parallel reality.” So they have chosen places that will open their eyes to other communities. They always stay in independent B&Bs and sometimes with the local vicar – it’s also a carefully considered way for them to have an interesting time whilst peddling an album. “We get to play in places we would never have seen otherwise.”

Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day
Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day.

I can totally relate to this idea – half the reason I was so attracted to fashion photography as a creative medium was the possibility of visiting interesting locations to take photos. During my nascent fashion photography career I went to South Africa and America before I began to realise the environmental problems of excessive air travel.

Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews.

The *world* premiere of the resulting Tin Tabernacle film was shown at The Social on Wednesday 16th March. It was entirely shot on an old 80s Hi 8 camera in three seconds bursts three or four times an hour, so it is basically what they describe as “a collection of moving photos” with mostly in-camera sound.

Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou - Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen
Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen.

This interactive approach to playing and documenting music is a result of Hannah and Trevor’s art college career. They both met at Goldsmiths, where Trevor was studying fine art and Hannah was doing theatre studies. By the time they reached their third year they were signed as the band Indigo Moss, which we profiled on Amelia’s Magazine. By this point they were spending so much time immersed in music that Trevor had to enlist the rest of the band to help get his degree show up on time.

Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana
Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana.

The couple have now been writing songs together for 8 years and seem a lot older and wiser than their 25 years of age, a fact which they attribute to having lots of older friends. They met whilst living in halls but did not start going out together until Indigo Moss, and managed to keep their relationship secret from other band members for two months. They got married in 2008.


There’s Something Happening Somewhere, a film by Trevor Moss.

Indigo Moss eventually broke up because they didn’t enjoy it anymore, especially the way the label was pushing the band. Inevitably, they were pulling bigger audiences as a duet. At that point Tom from Lewis Music saw them and they signed a one album deal. After that Jeff of Heavenly saw a couple of shows and as they put it “it all happened quite naturally. We had a cup of tea and the Tin Tabernacle tour really caught his imagination.” Heavenly Recordings have parted ways with megalith EMI and are now part of the Universal funded Cooperative Music initiative which supports independent labels such as Transgressive, Moshi Moshi, Bella Union and Domino. It means they can share PR costs and everyone knows when the others are releasing records so they don’t step on toes, which seems to make brilliant sense. These are amongst my favourite labels and between them they host some fabulous musicians – why would they want to deliberately compete with each other?

Trevor-Moss-Hannah-Lou-by-LJG-Art-Illustration
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by LJG Art & Illustration.

Ever prolific, Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou aim to put out one album a year from now on. The next record will be out in May and then comes the festival season, starting at Wood Festival on 21st May, and moving onto Truck Festival, Port Eliot and of course Glastonbury – where they played on my Climate Camp stage last year alongside Danny and the Champions of the World.


Performing at Wood Festival in 2009.

What to expect from the upcoming record? “There will be drums and a much bigger sound.” But as always all guitar and voices will be recorded together. I can’t imagine there will be much room in their van for more band members, and they agree that it is perfectly sized for just them. Although Trevor jokes that Hannah gets on his nerves it’s clear that this is very much a twosome. What happens when a family enters the equation? “Trevor wants to be a house husband,” laughs Hannah. “It will be a nice quiet time to write!” For now what they really want is a pet whippet. “They are lovely; so skinny and frail,” says Trevor. “It could travel in a hammock in the van.” The main trouble would be taking a dog into festivals, but I’m sure they could find an interesting series of venues that would accept a canine companion. Did someone mention lighthouses?

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

Written by Amelia Gregory on Wednesday March 23rd, 2011 12:11 pm

Categories ,11 Nights Under Tin, ,Alison Day, ,Arts Council, ,Bella Union, ,British Empire, ,Bush Hall, ,Cadgwith, ,Climate Camp, ,Cooperative Music, ,Cornish village, ,Cornwall, ,Danny and the Champions of the World, ,Domino Records, ,EMI, ,Emmeline Pidgen, ,Gilly Rochester, ,glastonbury, ,goldsmiths, ,Hannah Lou, ,Heavenly Recordings, ,Heavenly Social, ,Hi 8 camera, ,Indigo Moss, ,Lewis Music, ,LJG Art & Illustration, ,mining, ,Moshi Moshi, ,Port Eliot, ,Port Elliot, ,Reena Makwana, ,Sarah Matthews, ,The Social, ,There’s Something Happening Somewhere, ,Tin Tabernacle, ,Tin Tabernacle Tour, ,Transgressive, ,Trevor Moss, ,Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou, ,Tripod Stage, ,Truck Festival, ,Universal, ,Village Hall, ,Whippet, ,Wood Festival

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Amelia’s Magazine | A post Tin Tabernacle interview with Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou

by

Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, side effects the director of her recent videos, sildenafil to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, drug the director of her recent videos, hospital to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson.

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
TM AND HL-Jan 11-photography by Amelia Gregory
Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, viagra dosage all photography by Amelia Gregory.

Last week Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou held a preview screening for their Tin Tabernacle tour video, viagra sale titled 11 Nights Under Tin. I caught up with them at Bush Hall a few weeks ago to find out more about this talented couple.

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia GregoryTrevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

The Tin Tabernacle tour followed on from Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou’s Village Hall tour of last year. To pull it off they found approximately fifty churches through the Tin Tabernacles website, got details of about thirty of them and managed to stage concerts in eleven of them. The website often listed the nearest town or they enterprisingly zoomed in on the google street view: sometimes a contact number would be visible on a noticeboard, and at other times they phoned the local pub. Most people were really enthusiastic, but some were overwhelmed by the idea and worried by the commitment. “We wanted to get out into the community and play for people who don’t have much access to music,” they told me when I spoke to them at Bush Hall. “We went to those who were keen.” It seems to have been a successful venture: the audiences were mostly comprised of locals.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

The Tin Tabernacle churches all vary in size, though they have a few things in common. They are all made of corrugated iron, and were invented circa 1840, when the scattering of God fearing British citizens across the British Empire hastened the need for an easily transportable place of worship. Mining communities sprung up in all sorts of remote corners of the globe so the churches often had to be carried for long distances overland. “They warm up fast because they are wooden clad inside,” explained Trevor and Hannah, “but some had no electricity so we played by candlelight.” The smallest church held only about 40 people, all squashed into the pews, but the average capacity was between 70-120. What with Trevor, Hannah and their two support acts it was still quite a squish.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

I spotted a tin church on my visit to the Cornish village of Cadgwith earlier this year, but sadly this was not one that they managed to include on the tour, despite Trevor’s Cornish heritage. Many were nevertheless located in amazing locations, including on cliff tops.


11 Nights Under Tin, a film by Trevor Moss, can be watched in full above.

Why did they chose such an innovative way of touring? “We had toured the same venues for years and they are all the same, painted black inside.” Trevor and Hannah hope that with their Arts Council funded tours their audiences will experience an event, instead of just standing in the shadows. “It’s no wonder that so many bands’ later records are rubbish when they live in such a strange parallel reality.” So they have chosen places that will open their eyes to other communities. They always stay in independent B&Bs and sometimes with the local vicar – it’s also a carefully considered way for them to have an interesting time whilst peddling an album. “We get to play in places we would never have seen otherwise.”

Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day
Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day.

I can totally relate to this idea – half the reason I was so attracted to fashion photography as a creative medium was the possibility of visiting interesting locations to take photos. During my nascent fashion photography career I went to South Africa and America before I began to realise the environmental problems of excessive air travel.

Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews.

The *world* premiere of the resulting Tin Tabernacle film was shown at The Social on Wednesday 16th March. It was entirely shot on an old 80s Hi 8 camera in three seconds bursts three or four times an hour, so it is basically what they describe as “a collection of moving photos” with mostly in-camera sound.

Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou - Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen
Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen.

This interactive approach to playing and documenting music is a result of Hannah and Trevor’s art college career. They both met at Goldsmiths, where Trevor was studying fine art and Hannah was doing theatre studies. By the time they reached their third year they were signed as the band Indigo Moss, which we profiled on Amelia’s Magazine. By this point they were spending so much time immersed in music that Trevor had to enlist the rest of the band to help get his degree show up on time.

Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana
Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana.

The couple have now been writing songs together for 8 years and seem a lot older and wiser than their 25 years of age, a fact which they attribute to having lots of older friends. They met whilst living in halls but did not start going out together until Indigo Moss, and managed to keep their relationship secret from other band members for two months. They got married in 2008.


There’s Something Happening Somewhere, a film by Trevor Moss.

Indigo Moss eventually broke up because they didn’t enjoy it anymore, especially the way the label was pushing the band. Inevitably, they were pulling bigger audiences as a duet. At that point Tom from Lewis Music saw them and they signed a one album deal. After that Jeff of Heavenly saw a couple of shows and as they put it “it all happened quite naturally. We had a cup of tea and the Tin Tabernacle tour really caught his imagination.” Heavenly Recordings have parted ways with megalith EMI and are now part of the Universal funded Cooperative Music initiative which supports independent labels such as Transgressive, Moshi Moshi, Bella Union and Domino. It means they can share PR costs and everyone knows when the others are releasing records so they don’t step on toes, which seems to make brilliant sense. These are amongst my favourite labels and between them they host some fabulous musicians – why would they want to deliberately compete with each other?

Trevor-Moss-Hannah-Lou-by-LJG-Art-Illustration
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by LJG Art & Illustration.

Ever prolific, Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou aim to put out one album a year from now on. The next record will be out in May and then comes the festival season, starting at Wood Festival on 21st May, and moving onto Truck Festival, Port Eliot and of course Glastonbury – where they played on my Climate Camp stage last year alongside Danny and the Champions of the World.


Performing at Wood Festival in 2009.

What to expect from the upcoming record? “There will be drums and a much bigger sound.” But as always all guitar and voices will be recorded together. I can’t imagine there will be much room in their van for more band members, and they agree that it is perfectly sized for just them. Although Trevor jokes that Hannah gets on his nerves it’s clear that this is very much a twosome. What happens when a family enters the equation? “Trevor wants to be a house husband,” laughs Hannah. “It will be a nice quiet time to write!” For now what they really want is a pet whippet. “They are lovely; so skinny and frail,” says Trevor. “It could travel in a hammock in the van.” The main trouble would be taking a dog into festivals, but I’m sure they could find an interesting series of venues that would accept a canine companion. Did someone mention lighthouses?

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

Written by Amelia Gregory on Wednesday March 23rd, 2011 12:11 pm

Categories ,11 Nights Under Tin, ,Alison Day, ,Arts Council, ,Bella Union, ,British Empire, ,Bush Hall, ,Cadgwith, ,Climate Camp, ,Cooperative Music, ,Cornish village, ,Cornwall, ,Danny and the Champions of the World, ,Domino Records, ,EMI, ,Emmeline Pidgen, ,Gilly Rochester, ,glastonbury, ,goldsmiths, ,Hannah Lou, ,Heavenly Recordings, ,Heavenly Social, ,Hi 8 camera, ,Indigo Moss, ,Lewis Music, ,LJG Art & Illustration, ,mining, ,Moshi Moshi, ,Port Eliot, ,Port Elliot, ,Reena Makwana, ,Sarah Matthews, ,The Social, ,There’s Something Happening Somewhere, ,Tin Tabernacle, ,Tin Tabernacle Tour, ,Transgressive, ,Trevor Moss, ,Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou, ,Tripod Stage, ,Truck Festival, ,Universal, ,Village Hall, ,Whippet, ,Wood Festival

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