Jonas Odell Directs Promo For 'The Hours'

Nexus Productions director Jonas Odell has directed a promo for up and coming band ‘The Hours’.
Singer Ant Genn and keyboard player Martin Slattery, the two men behind The Hours and both originally session musicians for A-list bands such as Pulp and Black Grape, have been supported from the start of their two year ‘band’ career Damien Hirst, the internationally renowned artist and winner of the 1995 Turner prize.
Hirst was an instant fan of Odell’s work upon viewing his show reel and offered to give him free rein to use any of the album artwork he had created. The bands new song is called ‘Ali in the Jungle’.
The promo is in essence a theatrical show of clockwork machines and skull headed chorus lines. Odell captures a perfect mix between old-fashioned stage trickery and contemporary graphic design to change scenes, using both the sense of moving sets pushed in and out or emerging from trapdoors as well as pure animation transitions. Odell has also incorporated Hirst’s use of skulls, clocks and colour in the band’s artwork, mixing it up with dancers and singers. For example, some dancers have skulls for heads and there is also a skull with a collage mouth stuck on and lip synching. As the track grows, so the visual imagery and colour are expanded until by the end of the track, the stage is far more crowded and visually arresting than at the beginning.
Director Jonas Odell commented: "The track is meticulously produced. You get a sense of clockwork precision and I decided to reflect that visually by having the video take place within the confined space of a theatre stage with changes to the scenery being brought about by stage machinery rather than cuts."
Odell added: "Hirst gave me his artwork to use in the promo and he used a lot of imagery involving skulls so I wanted to link the video to the album art by populating our stage set with skull headed characters, sometimes acting out the lyrics, sometimes lip synching the track or sometimes forming a chorus line. I decided to create the material for the video from scratch, mixing live action and animation into a stage extravaganza."
(DS)