The Director Explains: Floyd Thursby - 'To those in flames'
Director Nassiem Valamanesh talks to us about the emotive, elemental visuals for Floyd Thursby’s sophisticated folk single, ‘To those in flames’.
’To those in flames’ is the title track taken from Floyd Thursby’s beautifully melancholic new 10-track album, out now!
Where was the video for ‘To those in flames’ filmed?
We shot in two locations in suburban Melbourne, Australia: a backyard in Coburg, and the ruins of an old stone farmhouse on the top of Gellibrand Hill in Greenvale.
How does the video connect with the song?
The song has a deep sense of yearning or regret and I wanted the visuals to convey that. Floyd’s vocals have an intimacy to them and I hope the camera work brings that out.
Do you have any behind the scenes stories you can share with us?
Floyd made my job easy: he found both locations and they were perfect! Gellibrand Hill is right near Melbourne’s largest airport and you wouldn’t know it to look but just out of shot, right by the ruins of the old farmhouse, is an enormous radar tower with a huge radar dish looming over us. It was quite spooky the way it constantly rotates silently. We thought of including a shot of it in the video as it looked quite cinematic but decided it didn’t fit with the theme. We shot in the middle of winter just after dawn so it was very cold up on top of that hill. By the end of the shoot Floyd was shivering so much he could barely speak! The backyard shoot was much warmer because we had a large fire drum we could stand around. We had to experiment quite a bit to get those shots of showers of sparks flying into the air. In the end we worked out we had to kick the side of the drum hard, but not so hard that it fell over!
Could you tell us about the ideas/ themes/ imagery used?
I felt it should be elemental, fire, earth, stone, water, clouds, somehow I knew those things would all just fit with the lyrics and the emotions in the song. Obviously the most central image is that of fire and flames, but also the consuming and destructive nature of fire. We used a close up shot of an old burnt tree to not only echo the desolation of the ruins on the hillside, but also to link the images of Floyd among those ruins to him at night by the open fire.
Is there a message the video is trying to convey?
I think a video should elevate a song. Usually my goal is to just be emotive and not to think too much about a message, one will usually surface and people can interoperate it in the their own ways. When I look at the video I feel a few things; a sense of time passing, a shared longing, a sadness.
Interview by Karla Harris