Keeping it small meant I could shoot for longer with a much smaller crew – sometimes just on my own. But with conventional cinematography, it wouldn’t have worked the same, and would have blown the budget with all the road closures and permits. It was weird to shoot a music video for such a high-profile artist on the camera I normally take with me on holiday. So, I shot it using my very basic camera. Capturing this sort of thing is tricky with a film camera as it’s so dark. We took a completely lo-fi approach to filming, rather than over-engineering anything. It was always in the back of my mind as something that would work in a video. They’re mirrors which distort their reflections, and there is a real rhythm there. Every time I drive on the motorway, I am always struck by the way lights reflect on the bodywork of cars. The important thing for me was to make a film that wasn’t mundane, but had that magic to it that is present in the music. It had a hypnotic compelling quality that I wanted to try and capture.
But I knew exactly what made that video stand out and why it felt right for the song. As it turns out - recording your motorway journey and posting it online is kind of a thing. But it was, in of itself, a fairly pedestrian YouTube video. When I watched it, it had such an incredible quality and smoothness to it. James had this video reference of a guy driving through Moscow that he’d seen online. Specifically, that feeling when you’re in traffic it always seems like you’re in the slowest lane. What kind of brief did James’ present to you and what were your immediate thoughts when you saw it?Įarly on, James explained the song was initially about comparing yourself to other people.
And by shooting both in LA and just outside Derby. In this Q&A on the making of the video for If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead - the first track since Blake's 2016 album The Colour in Anything – Brown explains that the secret of the success of this beautifully sleek promo was by keeping things small.
Alexander Brown's new video for James Blake is an automotive dream, brilliantly calibrated to match the rhythms and experimental cut-up vocals of the track.