Before moving to Madison, local filmmaker Shelby Floyd lived in Columbia, Missouri, where he met members of The Foundry Field Recordings, an emerging indie rock group that is starting to make a name for themselves with the album Prompts/Miscues. Over the summer, the group stopped in Madison on its tour and stayed with Floyd, who showed them some of his early stop-motion video work. The band subsequently asked him to direct a video for their song "Holding the Pilots/Holding the Facts." "I really liked the song they picked," Floyd says, "so it was easy to come up with the visual style I wanted to use."
The music video follows below.
Floyd tells more of the story behind the video:
My landlord was kind enough to let me take over a quarter of the basement. I started building the set around August 15th because I took a loft off of the curb to use as a base. I wanted wood so I could easily bolt the flowers to the ground. I spent a month or so coming up with a story and designing the set then another month and a half shooting and editing all in my spare time. Building the flowers took the longest, trying to get the right combination of stability, flexibility and texture.
Once I started shooting the video I finished a short clip to show the band the look I was going for. They liked it and kind of let me do my own thing.
Floyd first screened the video to an audience on Nov. 3 at Blank Box Video, the monthly local film screening organized by Andy Dayton and held at Indie Coffee on Regent Street. The next day, Floyd published the music video on YouTube. Less than a week later, it was featured on the high-profile music blog Brookly Vegan alongside other videos by the likes of The Decemberists, Tom Waits and Sufjan Stevens.
More information about The Foundry Field Recordings, including more of their music, is available at their MySpace page. "Hopefully," Floyd notes, "the video will introduce a few new people to The Foundry's music, because they are a really great band."
If you wish to let us know about more videos by, of, and about Madison and Madisonians, please consider adding them to the Isthmus YouTube group or send a message.
