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Watch: DP Gregory Oke’s Hand-Scratched Animated Music Video for Will Epstein’s Golden
Will Epstein - Golden from Gregory Oke on Vimeo.
Cinematographer Gregory Oke, whose credits include Charlotte Wells’s astonishing debut Aftersun, recently made his first foray into music video. His clip for Will Epstein’s “Golden” is unexpected, a pulsing, sinuous work of animation in which he hand-scratched film negative as well as shot the singer and then treated the resulting footage in similarly analogue ways. Watch the video above, and read below statements from both Epstein and Oke.
“When I met Greg, I could tell right away he was a kindred spirit even though all the points of our shared aesthetic sensibility weren’t immediately known to us. Naturally, I was touched when he was moved enough by my music to train his nimble eye (and hand) on a film to accompany “Golden” from my album Wendy which came out in February on Fat Possum Records. The scratch/painted film aesthetic felt like a perfect methodology to pair with the song as the meticulous and nimble tactility of this approach was very much in line with how I went about arranging the sonic landscape of my piece. Sounds were placed like objects in space, hung like glowing lanterns, and then transfigured and transformed in undulating waves. Greg and I also discussed some of the visual imagery that I had in my head when crafting the song—particularly desert landscapes with their warm hues and radical detritus. I love how it came out and am grateful to Greg for his painstaking devotion!”— Will Epstein
