A love letter to cinema and music, featuring songs I love dancing to and clips from movies and TV series that I love that may have people dancing in them, but also may not! More information below the video.
In the second half of 2020, after Aotearoa’s four-week lockdown, I made a mix and, for the first time, turned it into a video. It’s a collage film, and if you’re between 30 and 40 in particular it should hit some sweet spots for you. If you’re younger or older than that, maybe the nostalgia won’t be there, but the tunes are still all certified bangers/chin strokers/dreamy bliss.
The mix features 70 minutes of music from, but not limited to, The Chemical Brothers, Chicane, Burial, Deee-Lite, Soulwax, and Delerium, and the video contains footage from 50 movies/TV shows/music videos, from In The Mood For Love and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night to Pride and Prejudice and West Side Story, and Amour and Dirty Dancing (obviously).
It started as a request from a friend of the family who had been having a (particularly) bad year and wanted something to dance to. The mix took about a month and then I decided to turn it into a video because why not. I’ve done a couple of smaller collage film/music video things in the past, but never a 70-minute, beat-matched, narrative-driven mashup of footage from lots and lots of movies (and some TV) that I love. It was a lot of fun to make, and a much needed thing to do in 2020.
The initial idea was to simply find footage of people dancing and put that over the music, with the idea that the 3% of you with projectors could project the video onto your wall while listening to the mix. Then I started to see themes and links in the footage, or I forced them, and it eventually turned into the vague feature-length journey of a night out dancing – something not many of us had been able to do for a while by the end of 2020 when I initially shared this via email. I won’t say much more.
There was only one rule: footage that was originally cut to music for comedic value couldn’t be used for an additional layer of humour, if that makes sense. But of course that rule was broken.
There’s a list of the songs and video clips at the end of the video. I missed two films! Maybe you can guess them?