Distant Street Lights Video

Codes In The Clouds – Distant Street Lights (iambic Remix) – Official Music Video from Erased Tapes on Vimeo.

After seeing Olafur Arnalds live in Peacock Visual Arts Centre in dec 2007, it ignited a love affair with Erased Tapes records. It seemed like a record label made just for me. The following February I was lucky enough to attend an Olafur Arnalds show at the Monto Rats in London. That's when I saw Codes In The Clouds for the first time. Then they were up and coming and still finding their feet. Now flash forward almost 3 years and we're all good friends, Katerwaul playing 4 gigs with them. This year I nominated my services to make them a music video. I'm not sure they took me entirely serious. I had an Idea in mind so I pitched it to Shaun. He loved it and so we got writing. Ciaran sent me one of the latest Remixed versions of Distant Street Lights, probably to call my bluff. But by June we'd done it. Factotum Films had finished their first Music Video.

Casting the male role was easy. Our good friend Martin Murphy has known and worked with us for years, Shaun and Martin made the short animation "Toshiba60". We sat down one day and did a screen test reading various materials with Martin. As usual I was reading all the female parts. Martin's audition was a great success and we let him sweat all of a couple of hours before telling him the part was his. We decided to use this exercise to get back into shooting our own material so we borrowed a camera and DOF adapter from our usual cinematographer Dave and we used my camera set up as a second. The idea was to film both character perspectives with each camera. Richard stepped in to light our subjects so it was all in place... oh wait we hadn't cast a girl.

We had already started shooting and we still didn't have anyone to play our female lead. It was by chance I was borrowing a tripod from Topher Henderson, a local photographer, that it hit me. Bex, his girlfriend so innocently not knowing her life was going to change forever! We managed to guilt her into it and the rest was history.

Distant Street Lights was a fun experience. We always wanted it to be back to basics film making like we did a few years ago only employing the experiences we have gained since. It took 2 days to shoot and about 4 days to edit.

We were sworn into secrecy by the bands management to not show anyone this video until they could secure an exclusive and then use it as a promotional tool. Not bad for messing about one weekend, and the band themselves not thinking I was being serious. Ciaran claims that Stephen hit the roof with excitement after seeing it. Not sure how true that was but after seeing him watch the ENGLAND vs USA world cup game, I can certainly imagine what that may look like.

So finally after months of secrecy its finally been announced and premiered. So I hope you all enjoy it as much as we had making it.

Special thank you to;

Martin John Murphy

Rebecca Prentice

Richard Browne

David Falconer

Caroline Smith

Rebecca Wheeler

Rae Duncan

Sam Brill & Jen Mullen

Also to Robert, Ciaran, Stephen, Jack, Joe, Rob and Dan and everyone else at Erased Tapes.