Art Brute is a recurring feature that asks artists of every calibre, every style, about their recent work.

A few days back, I posted an oddly hypnotizing video for Julian Lynch jam, "Seed." Directed by amateur filmmaker Amy Ruhl, and off of Lynch's debut LP, Orange You Glad (Olde English Spelling Bee), the video scored world-eroding fuzz to endless collages of hazy, 16mm geography. I inhaled it. Through an email conversation I learnt how Ruhl shackled "Seed" together and why the overhead projector is her favourite toy.

What kind of education prepares someone for the director's chair?
I haven't had much formal training. I spent about 2 and a half semesters in film school before dropping out and getting a degree in literature. I would say the time I spent [working] at the Library for the Performing Arts was probably the most significant training I've undergone. It's an antiquarian's paradise, all of the archival materials: marble-covered scrapbooks, film stills, stage dioramas, hand-tinted photographs, the act of preservation itself... Just having my eyes open [in] the three years spent working there gave me more inspiration for developing a personal aesthetic than, I believe, any film school could ever deliver.

Okay. Who contacted whom?
I approached Julian about doing a video the first time I heard his music.  I honestly never had that much interest in making music videos, but his songs reminded me so much of all the 60's psychadelia I'd been listening to for awhile—so blissed-out at times, melancholy at others—that I wanted to see if I could come up with images to match that tone.  I sent him some video excerpts of other work I had done and he was really complimentary and open to the idea.  From there I started corresponding with Todd Ledford (of Olde English Spelling Bee - SD); Julian and Todd let me have the freedom to come up with whatever I wanted. After I gave them a first draft they got involved in the revision process, but generally I was left to my own devices.

Parts seem to spiral down to infinity, others I'm just discovering. What was the process like?
The process began with a long, sometimes frustrating image search on various digital archives, looking for photographs that lend themselves to being cut up; interesting elements in the foreground that will stay, but also clear contrasts in shade that give me a path to follow while I'm cutting into it. I let the image itself tell me where things need to happen. With the stereoscopes, I always replaced the skyline with papers or covers of antique scrapbooks that I then animated to morph and bend based on color difference. I try to look for things within photographs that would have motion, had they been filmed instead, and then find or create moving footage to go in its place. I suppose the process is really about choosing what to preserve from the original that will maintain stillness, and then what I can dispose of to make the overall collage more cinematic.  I embellish from there, adding elements of texture or color I wish existed already in the image I started with.

Was it daunting to suddenly find yourself with this much responsibility?
Hmmm, well I was lucky in that I was given the chance to pick the song, and obviously a music video is only going to be as good as the music it accompanies. Julian's music has a cinematic quality to it already. The tempo, [that] hypnotic quality—the repetitions allow you to really conjure and develop visuals in your head that aren't fleeting. I chose "Seed" because the lyrics are sparse, and I didn't want to end up literalizing every word that was sung. That technique is pretty cheesy to me unless it's purposely overdone and laced with irony.  Instead, I approached it by latching onto the imagery he creates at the beginning of "Seed," but then departing from it when the song bends into just pure instrumentation.  I tried to pay my dues to what I felt the song 'looks' like, but then let myself indulge in a style that felt authentic and familiar to me. 

This feels analog in a way most videos aren't. What tools did you use?
I use an overhead projector a lot, it's sort of my favorite toy right now—to create shadows, oil light projections, or just to place transparent objects on and then photograph or film the projection with a digital still camera. I photograph and scan a lot of materials I find or make, sometimes painting them first or manipulating them in some way. What's usually most important is that I capture the texture. I find 16mm films—usually educational or industrial films—that have been digitized to cut into and shape in After Effects, where I do all the final collaging. 

How long did it take then?
Somehow, I finished the first draft in a week, working almost 12 hours a day on it. Kind of crazy, I guess.   I think I work much more aggressively when I have someone to answer to, rather than when it's just my own personal endeavors.  After I got asked to make some changes, I scrapped all of the original stereoscope collages except for one and made new ones, which took another week.  More specifically, the collages can take around two days to produce 30-40 seconds [of content] when I'm not in total high-speed mode.

 
Looking back, did you think it'd be this much work?
I definitely found "Seed" more challenging than my other projects. I realized when making this music video that it is much, much easier for me to pick images and know where I'm going with them when it's guided by narrative. I suppose I could have tried to create some sort of story for "Seed," but for me personally, I just feel like there's not enough time within the duration of the song to really develop anything that would not reek of lameness. I got a minute into the song, already sort of exhausted, and realized there was still a monstrous (but lovely), three and a half minute long jam session left to work with. I felt as if I was sort of just creating pure aesthetic, which was difficult for me because, well, I'm pretentious. Everything else I've worked on has taken feminist-themed narratives, deriving a style and form from there. With the music video, I could go anywhere, which is a scary feeling for me.

What did Julian say about the finished product?
It seems like he really dug the final version. All of our correspondence was via email, so it's kind of hard to tell. But given he used some exclamation points and all caps in his response, he seemed pretty excited.