When we first came across new director Penny Vozniak’s music video for Appleonia (Jessica Chapnik Kahn) we weren’t sure who to admire the most – film maker or singer – or perhaps the collaborative power of both for persevering to create the magical It’s Not Precious video which you can see in Related Content along with a clip of the messy experimentation to get the single-take.
Now the singer-filmmaker team have played around again, creating a backwards version of Precious called Heavy, Lord it Gets.
Was Heavy a happy accident?
We played the video backwards one day, it sounded so cool and we heard little words…so Jessy wrote new lyrics to the shape and sound of her mouth backwards. She then sang these lyrics in a studio watching herself on a huge screen to match her movements, then Ian Ball from Gomez remixed the music so that it kept that backwards feel but sounded like a totally new song. The result is Heavy, Lord it Gets…Jessy loved it so much that the song is one of the tracks on her recently released album Oh.
So making God must have been a piece of cake?
We did everything on it ourselves, a true two-woman team. It took us a long time to finish…from the time I sat Jessy down in little cafe in Bondi 18 month ago and drew the whole thing out in a notepad for her, to shooting several tests and experiments over almost a year, then rethinking and reshooting the whole thing three times to satisfy our vision… and then I had to learn how to colour grade so we could get the magical effect we desired. We made another little ‘making of’ of the experiments because some of them were so beautiful we couldn’t bear tucking them away on a harddrive.
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