TEST: THE CLOCK AT THE BACK OF THE CAGE

THE CLOCK AT THE BACK OF THE CAGE

Video #2!

A NOTE FROM AMANDA:

hallo loves. this song, “the clock at the back of the cage,” is far and away my favorite on the “i can spin a rainbow” album, because it’s the most painfully personal.

edward and i co-wrote this whole record together sitting in his house (in hornchurch) and in imogen’s house (in havering-atte-bower)…and we took turns starting/continuing different songs. this song was penned mostly by me, with edward’s magical production touches and vocals bringing it to life. i wrote it late one night on imogen’s glockenspiel in the basement….and it was one of the most kismet-y moments of the whole recording process when i looked at edward the next day after playing it and singing it for him, and i said: “but….you sing this one. it will mean more to me.”

we got to work and i decided to sing the chorus – to make it a duet of sorts – edward narrates, i fill in. all of the sound effects are edward’s. oh, loves….listening to my most personal of lyrics coming out of edward’s mouth, in That Voice (edward’s voice still brings me to tears, sometimes, it’s so fragile and broken, and it was the soundtrack to my teenage years)….it was like a full circle rainbow of art and pain and time.

the video came about in a similar cosmic collision. christy and luke were friends-of-friends in circus-world and this whole video process happened REALLY FAST. christy and i got together in the first place just so we could introduce our babies and talk about motherhood – she’s got a little boy named tully who is just a few months younger than ash. and then art happened.

FUCKING…..YAY MOMS MAKING ART. i’m a fan.
i asked christy if she would write up something about the PAIN AND SUFFERING of making stop-animation…and there’s some great production stills below, and she came back with so much of the story that i don’t need to tell you much. but yes…i was dreaming up some kind of animated otherworldly video for this song when all of a sudden christy and luke plopped into my life, and happened to be perfect. so we just went with it. the result is, i think, one of the best videos to come out of AFP-land in a long time, and i’m really really proud we went for it.
stop-motion is PAINSTAKING….you can’t believe the amount of work that goes into just a few seconds of what you are watching. it’s why it is so important to me that you watch this ON A FULL SCREEN, AS LARGE AS POSSIBLE – you’ll get so much more out of it!
i am seriously grateful to christy, luke, chris (who dropped everything to squeeze this directing job in) and ALL the behind-the-scenes assistants and helpers who made this video fly.and, because i cannot resist….here’s a picture of OUR BABIES, ash and tully, BEING CUTE TOGETHER (neil’s comment: “Elf in semi-convincing human form contemplates luring a human baby off to Elfland.”

xxx

afp

ABOUT THE PROCESS

A NOTE FROM CO-DIRECTOR CHRISTY LOUISE FLAWS

Firstly, I am a physical performer and not a writer, not a poet. I dream up things in pictures and by jumping around, but here is an attempt at some thoughts and words. It started when a few years ago our awesome housemates invited Amanda to borrow a bike while she was in Melbourne. Then in December there was an email nudge saying something to the tune of, ”you both have babies, you both make things, you’ll all be in the same place, so hang out!”
Luke and I live in Clunes in Regional Victoria and I wasn’t planning to be in Melbourne… Luke had headed away to Sydney for work for a couple weeks in January, a few days after he left there was a bushfire really close to where we live, so I decided to head in to Melbourne. Amanda had offered for us to stay with her and one day turned into a few.
A couple months earlier Luke and I had collaborated with Chris Bennett from Underground Media on a short promo clip for our upcoming show at Adelaide Fringe, it was a project I was really excited about, we were about to do a season of a new show but we didn’t have any footage from our first season that was good enough to use so I suggested we attempt to make a stop motion film that would give people the idea of the show.

None of us had worked in stop motion before but I’d heard awesome things about Chris and asked if he wanted to give it a crack. Our friend Dan had an empty warehouse and moveable scaff tower which he let us use which meant we could film from 9 metres in the air. On the day of filming a bunch of things fell into place (read things went wrong but Chris found elegant solutions) including that by the time our babysitter had to leave we still had a massive chunk left to photograph (imagine Chris holding our baby standing under the camera taking a photo with a remote… running out of scene… handing Luke or I the baby… moving every item approximately 30 cm and then doing it all over again).

The draft of our showreel arrived in my inbox while I was sitting with Amanda watching the babes, I think I must have made some sound of happiness/relief and she asked to see it. I got a text one day while she was rehearsing at Bakehouse saying she had an idea for a simple video she needed to make and could I see if the filmmaker/space might be available.
So then there was a phone call to Chris and a picnic in the park with watermelon and a conversation on a rooftop under the stars with my baby crawling around like a wild thing because of a failed attempt to put both children in the same cot… too much excitement (I think my baby had fomo). We talked about cages and shadows and listened and re-listened. The song was so full of imagery it felt like a dreamscape.
There was a tiny window where Chris, Luke and I were all available to film and the warehouse we wanted to use had a one week window before it turned into an amazing circus training space and one of the first things they needed to do was cover the floor. We planned to film in the evenings between 8pm-2am so that we had consistent lighting (the warehouse we used has skylights) and so I could get Luke’s mum to look after the babe.

We had a bunch of phone conversations and Luke, Chris and I each wrote up/drew a version of how we could see the song translated into images, we had a couple meetings at Chris’s and ended up spending an entire day in lockdown in Clunes trying to piece the thing together. We had visions of creating images with tiny broken objects. I desperately wanted to use clothes to create almost pixilated images. We struggled over which ideas to let go of… We had clearly forgotten our previous conversation after the last epic stop motion adventure where we had in fact said “Lets never do stop motion again.” The song danced around our heads for weeks.

Amanda said “I just trust you”. Luke and I are so used to such a long lead in for projects… imagine the thing, talk to other people about the thing, try to find a space, some money, a space to rehearse to perform, find a way to pay for costumes, build the set over long long nights while everyone else has gone home. And then there was this bizarre and beautiful situation, two months to conceive and then we were on the floor of a mostly empty warehouse in Pascoe vale.

There was something Chris said at some point, which stayed with me, “There is a kind of inherent suffering in this process.” There was something slightly insane about the slowness of the work and then there were moments where we would have a break and the last 3 hours work was turned into this moving breathing thing and we grinned and slammed back sweet drinks and handfuls of chips and chocolate and kept going like some kind of surreal teenage sleepover. One night around 6 hours was spent with Luke lying on the ground where we would take breaks when he was about to lose it and would shout something along the lines of “is the timer on? Get the photo I have to move, I can’t hold it”.

We had 5 nights, each night we broke down the scene and described to our incredible assistants “so here we want the sheets to become an elephant” or we’d half scrawl the image of a collapsing queen and say “she’s falling apart, looming, not too precisely just like this picture.” The planning process, Chris breaking down the 8 photographs per second to try to match up the images with key points in the song was timed so precisely but then there was the reality of moving literally thousands of pieces of broken furniture, cloth tentacles and cliffs without any real rehearsal. Luke and I were moved like mannequins around the space and then slowly piece by piece it started to become something. We moved about 10 cm each time we took a photo, some scenes took far longer than we were expecting so our solution was to have a timer on set at one minute each time it went off the assistants ran out of the frame, Chris took a photo and at times they literally ran back in and did it all again.
[PLACEHOLDER FOR GIFs]

We had estimated that it would take 4 nights and had an extra night put aside as a buffer, by the 3^rd night we were so far behind we had a panic meeting. The entire shoot finished at approximately 5:30am on the 5^th night just before the sun started to come up. Luke and I drove back across the city to his mum’s place flanked by tradie vehicles and by the time we’d had showers our baby was awake, it was a brutal and fucking spectacular project to be a part of.
Thanks so much to you Patrons for trusting Amanda to trust us, I really appreciate it.

Love,
Christy

THE CREDITS

Directed by: Christy Louise Flaws, Chris Bennett, & Luke O’Connor
Cinematography: Chris Bennett
Performed by: Christy Louise Flaws & Luke O’Connor
Artistic assistants: Amanda Sabo, Helen Turton, Ollie Versteegen
Christy Louise Flaws & Luke O’Connor are: www.askingfortrouble.com.au
Chris Bennett is: www.undergroundmedia.net.au & www.chrisbennett.net.au

Special Thanks to Dan Rabin at www.thecircusspot.com.au for the use of his venue, to Jens Altheimer for the use of his equipment, to Tim Elliott for behind the scenes photography, to Tim Elliott and Lauren Cruickshank for props and assistance, to all the people who donated clothes and fabric, and to Deborah James and Robert Murray for baby wrangling. We couldn’t have done it without you.

THE LYRICS

We used to talk all the time
The blindfolded bodies you stacked in the barn
And they told you not to look behind you

The elephants walk in a line
The ringmaster takes off his hat to the queen
And she opens her mouth as they file inside

You used to tell me the hurt
The way they would strap you
In freezing white basements
And wire your heart til your hopefulness burst

The queen cannot fit through the arch
So she strips off your sisters and tells you to march
And you fall in line with your hands on your throat
The parade of paralysis starts

The ringmaster heads into town for the day
When they were just little he’d staked them in place
They’re free now to roam
And they’re free to run home
But they’ve lost the idea of escape

How they crowned you
Weighted and drowned you
How they made you numb
No bandage around you
I’ve found and unwound you
Now how to make you run

And the queen she is falling apart
She clutches the bannister shaking in shock
At the ugliness of her own heart
The ugliness of her own heart

I had a dream that we talked
We went to the White Cliffs and went for a walk
And I counted the times that our true loves had died
And you took my hand and looked over the side
And we saw your body down there
Getting taken away by the tide

Now they’re all gone but you’ve stayed
The door is unlatched, but you are not afraid
There’s a nice patch of straw and a comfortable cage
The door is unlatched, but you’re not afraid
There’s a nice patch of straw and a comfortable cage

How they crowned you
Weighted and drowned you
How they made you numb
No bandage around you
I’ve found and unbound you
Now how to make you run, run, run, run, run…