Tag: Future Islands

Another week, another new music video. This one is definitely a labor of love on many fronts, but first:

As you can see, this combines a lot of different visual and video styles (from regular taping to stills, to animation, stock footage, and other variations). But that variety serves to push forward a specific vision, based on a specific (and haunting) song by Future Islands, masterfully voiced by Samuel Herring.

Here’s what director Jerry Stifelman has to say:

“I’d been thinking about how all relationships in life — from human lovers to the way gravity holds us to the planet — are all about push and pull. I think this push and pull is at the root of all ecstasy and misery. And the sweet spot between this, is intimacy. This is what I feel when I hear Samuel Herring of Future Islands sing ‘so far away’ in the song, An Apology. It’s what I feel when I hear him sing ‘Here, in my chest where you burst, I keep the crush and the weight of the world.'”

“The moment where we connect with each other against ‘the weight of the world’ is the essence of this video. To get at this, we focused on people being, uh, facially intimate. Most of our subjects were real couples we found. In one case, we used an actor. And in three cases, we paired people together who had not kissed before. A big part of the video wasn’t just this interpretation of the meaning of the song, but its sound, which feels less like the conscious creation of a group of musicians than something they teased out of the world. It’s like a song found in the ruins of an ancient amusement park where lovers once walked together. To play to this feeling with the imagery, we used a lot of grain and visual noise, actually having images break apart into static, almost like the way nothing lasts in the world. Even the camera angles, were chosen to feel almost impersonal. I kept pretending the camera was actually an alien probe trying to figure human beings out. The distance between what the camera’s not feeling and what the people are adds to both the tension and the sweetness. To help universalize the emotions, we included the stop-motion footage of the wooden figures, along with the dolphins, the pigeons, and the goats. Because, you know, we’re all in this together.”

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