Radar
Radar
STRAIGHT TO VIDEO
Quirky music video director Ace Norton multiplies Mandy Moore and decapitates Ben Gibbard.
“It’s about a guy,” Ace Norton begins, “a space man, who enters into a ghost town where everybody is frozen still in their last moments of life. There’s a priest who’s crying but his tears are frozen in the air, and two teenagers are making love but they’re stuck in time, and animals rule the world…”
The director is describing his next project, the music video for Cold War Kids’ single “Hospital Beds.” “It’s very weird and surreal,” Norton continues; and that could be said of most of his video repertoire. He talks excitedly and quickly, telling the story of when he was a starving artist on Venice Beach to now: creating videos for a mixed bag of musicians from Norah Jones to freewheeling indie rockers the Teddybears to chamber pop Frenchman Sebastien Tellier, liberally scattering throughout such nuggets as, “I have this motto, there’s no point in doing it if you don’t have fun with it” with a nonchalance that sounds like the job is just too easy. And he’s only 24.
The thing is, Norton could have had it easy from the start. His father, Bill Norton Jr., is a director too; his grandfather, William Norton Sr., is a screenwriter and producer; and his mother, is a script supervisor on feature films. “I didn’t get anything handed to me,” Norton says with some urgency. In fact, his father admonishing the evils of the industry only fueled Norton’s desire to do things his own way. Despite being given an 8mm camera at age 10 and shooting over 200 short films before even graduating high school, film school at USC wasn’t for him. “It took the fun out of filmmaking for me, so I dropped out. I was a busboy for a year, low on my luck, fucking flat broke…that was like the defining point for me.” Norton found himself lingering around Los Angeles music spots such as The Echo and The Lounge, offering to make equally strapped bands homemade videos for the five bucks in their back pocket.
That was until Death Cab for Cutie asked him to direct the big-budget music video for “Crooked Teeth” in the vein of Peter Gabriel’s 1986 animation masterpiece “Sledgehammer.” Soon enough, singer Ben Gibbard’s head was painted, wrapped in bandages, floating in space, with airplanes flying in one ear and out the other...every single frame moved by hand. “I like to do things as practically as possible, even if it ends up with that chanciness to it,” says Norton. “That’s the beauty of stop-motion—those faults—the motion of the object will be a little fucked up at times, they will jump frames, and won’t be exactly precise.”
Norton has since used this technique to place the Faint in a labyrinthine head trip, Mandy Moore (60 versions of her, no less) piled up to form a pop-star high-rise, and a host of other artists not quite looking themselves in videos produced by his own company, Commondeer. All this, and he’s surprisingly ego-free. “I hate everything that I do… I’m biting my fingernails. Well, I like everything that I do but I don’t think I’m that good.” That said, he’s still dreaming big: “If Beck reads this, hook it up! I love you, Beck.”
The director is describing his next project, the music video for Cold War Kids’ single “Hospital Beds.” “It’s very weird and surreal,” Norton continues; and that could be said of most of his video repertoire. He talks excitedly and quickly, telling the story of when he was a starving artist on Venice Beach to now: creating videos for a mixed bag of musicians from Norah Jones to freewheeling indie rockers the Teddybears to chamber pop Frenchman Sebastien Tellier, liberally scattering throughout such nuggets as, “I have this motto, there’s no point in doing it if you don’t have fun with it” with a nonchalance that sounds like the job is just too easy. And he’s only 24.
The thing is, Norton could have had it easy from the start. His father, Bill Norton Jr., is a director too; his grandfather, William Norton Sr., is a screenwriter and producer; and his mother, is a script supervisor on feature films. “I didn’t get anything handed to me,” Norton says with some urgency. In fact, his father admonishing the evils of the industry only fueled Norton’s desire to do things his own way. Despite being given an 8mm camera at age 10 and shooting over 200 short films before even graduating high school, film school at USC wasn’t for him. “It took the fun out of filmmaking for me, so I dropped out. I was a busboy for a year, low on my luck, fucking flat broke…that was like the defining point for me.” Norton found himself lingering around Los Angeles music spots such as The Echo and The Lounge, offering to make equally strapped bands homemade videos for the five bucks in their back pocket.
That was until Death Cab for Cutie asked him to direct the big-budget music video for “Crooked Teeth” in the vein of Peter Gabriel’s 1986 animation masterpiece “Sledgehammer.” Soon enough, singer Ben Gibbard’s head was painted, wrapped in bandages, floating in space, with airplanes flying in one ear and out the other...every single frame moved by hand. “I like to do things as practically as possible, even if it ends up with that chanciness to it,” says Norton. “That’s the beauty of stop-motion—those faults—the motion of the object will be a little fucked up at times, they will jump frames, and won’t be exactly precise.”
Norton has since used this technique to place the Faint in a labyrinthine head trip, Mandy Moore (60 versions of her, no less) piled up to form a pop-star high-rise, and a host of other artists not quite looking themselves in videos produced by his own company, Commondeer. All this, and he’s surprisingly ego-free. “I hate everything that I do… I’m biting my fingernails. Well, I like everything that I do but I don’t think I’m that good.” That said, he’s still dreaming big: “If Beck reads this, hook it up! I love you, Beck.”
SAMANTHA GILEWICZ
This story was published on July 10, 2007.
Share
CONTENT RATING:
( 4 )
( 4 )
|
|
|
|
|
