My first music video collaboration with Natalie McCool, who had been asked by Q magazine editor and writer Paul Du Noyer to cover a song live for a panel he was hosting at 2013’s Threshold Festival. The song she picked was Billy Fury’s ‘Wondrous Place’, as she had received a grant from his memorial fund earlier in her career.
Her resulting version of the song is very different in tone to the original, unsettling and dark, so when it came to the shoot we found an abandoned site in the North West and crafted a narrative about a young woman visiting an unloved place with a ghostly past. Shot entirely in slow motion on a particularly overcast day, we managed to capture an eerie stillness that suited the song perfectly.
In April 2020, Natalie’s version of ‘Wondrous Place’ was used in the Sky TV trailer for ‘The Third Day’ – a psychological thriller set on a mysterious island – harnessing the track’s unnerving quality yet again.
| Director / Cinematographer / Editor | dur. 3m 26s |
James Kirkham | IXIOD