Aidan Zamiri

0:00 [Applause]

0:03 oh thank you so much.

0:03 That's so nice my name is Aidan Zamiri kind of a fake name I use my grandmother's maiden name because it's easier to google and it sounds a lot cooler then my real name which is aiden o'rourke so sorry it's my dad I often tell people I'm a photographer and a director so today I will prove it sometimes I take photos which are kind of spooky or they're very fashiony sometimes they're kind of blurry but they I think they still look good sometimes it's not a photo it's a it's a video and it's a slow tie next to a big shoe but before I did any of this I studied at central st martin's for three years I thought that was quite funny so you can kind of have you know what happens during those three years that you sort of become a lot more seeking I I studied graphic design there.

1:00 But I didn't actually do a lot of graphic design what was cool about that course I thought is that it was a lot less about designing graphics and a lot more about finding kind of creative and efficient solutions to problems but that being said my degree show piece was a telephone that screamed at you in spanish I don't know what problem that solved but that kind of ethos is something that did stay with me. And it stayed with me in my work and that I'm often trying my best to explain a feeling or a point or an idea not only as beautifully but also as efficiently as I can I'm trying to communicate maybe an abstract thing as directly as possible so I'm gonna rewind even further and can I talk about my first real connection to visual culture and visual media I I'll explain that in a minute I I grew up in a sort of suburban town about 40 minutes outside of glasgow and I was on the internet a lot and my parents were great and they took me to a lot of museums and galleries when I was young but I didn't really care that much I now obviously like art but my first real obsession with imagery came from the kind of visuals and the theatrics connected to pop stars and musicians I kind of loved the way that they were able to mythologize their own lives not just through their music.

2:30 But also through the the visuals they were putting out and their performances and their sort of public personas it's kind of like we as an audience could sort of see this human odyssey playing out and kind of interact with it in real time. And I kind of found that pop stars were so embedded in our culture that they kind of their work inherently responded to the world around them even if it meant they were making their own worlds within it so to explain this I I mean I think this is something we can all relate to I first saw the s club 7 movie and then green day's american idiot album booklet and then the black eyed peas were in a video game that I played and and then lady gaga had her 2009 vma performance rishi-san paparazzi and now I think this takes us to our current era which is lana del rey's monologue for the music video for ride I don't think I need to explain that I think we all get it.

3:26 But I guess first and foremost I've always been like a fan and I weirdly I think that's one of the things.

3:30 That's been most helpful in my career I've approached everything with a sort of excitement and an instinctiveness but also with a kind of analytical understanding of what music imagery can be so now I do that as a large part of my job which is delightful and there's some recent things I've done sega bodega's recent album cover our album campaign this is the video I did which was shot from the inside of my mouth this is caroline politics recent album campaign as well and just to show you how how my work is often kind of has a conversation with the world around it and and the way that it's met by fans and audiences here's a sort of little testimony that says aiden zamiri needs his ass eight and just to clarify they do they do tell us that people should be rewarded for good deeds so we know that that is a good thing here's some other work I've done a music video for young lean and another artist called fka twigs who I'm gonna be talking about a lot more and you might have spotted it there we had a little reference to nelly and kelly's video for dilemma from the early naughties and kelly rowland did notice here she says that's some funny lameo [Applause]

4:55 I know and the reason I find that really exciting is it's really cool when your work does kind of become part of the the wider world. And it sort of dips its tendrils into into a more mainstream audience and you can kind of have a conversation with the world in that way.

5:09 So yeah that brings me to capri songs which is a project that I have been working on with an artist called fk twigs and if you don't know who she is go on the internet or something.

5:23 And this was quite an unusual project. Actually sorry quite an unusual project because when we first started talking about it it was quite a different brief from what we ended up with our first conversations were back in like autumn of 2020 which is a really long time ago especially when you're thinking about music projects most of those kind of start and end within about a month so this was a really long time to let ideas stew and let ideas develop interesting when we first had a conversation about oh just just to clarify capri songs is a 17 track mix tape by twigs so it's a music project.

6:04 But yeah when we first started talking about it my brief was actually quite different we we talked about wanting to make a kind of excess of short form content so that was like a lot of almost kind of disposable videos things that would exist on social media just so we could kind of support this next tape campaign and sort of spew out a lot of stuff obviously we mean twigs kind of wants to push that as far as we could but I thought what was interesting about that as a brief is that rather than trying to ignore the the way that we consume media at the moment which is extremely quickly we were kind of using it as something to play with and something to put our own spin on. And something we could kind of challenge I guess so what not only where we were kind of reacting to the context of the world we also kind of wanted to react to the context of twigs career and before this she'd really been posed as a kind of ethereal poetic goddess you know and and that was in her kind of previous work to this point and although that was a large part of her art I think she felt like there was a large section of her personality which wasn't really being communicated through her work that much.

7:19 And that's the fact that she's a really funny and very real person. And so what what we were aiming to do with it was to kind of place twigs into the real world and give her a space to be funny and reckless and chaotic and and free I guess so yeah that gave us a very like wide open brief and we didn't really know what we were gonna do so we started talking a lot on facetime and twigs sent me every possible demo and every idea she might have had and we sort of started compiling this really big document everything we'd ever thought of it was kind of puking into my whatsapp every day with all these different references and and so we kind of were thinking about things that might have been like sort of many moving images or maybe even like documenting conversations not a lot of it was actually related to making music content necessarily but as we as it kind of developed and as we kind of kind of kept going we started gravitating to sort of sections of songs and thinking ah that makes sense but that's we started pairing things together and of course with a mixtape you're working with kind of different resources than what you would with an album basically you have kind of small less resources I guess you have smaller budgets than you would within it with an album campaign so we had to rein in a bit and figure out what were the things what were the ideas which resonated the most with us. And we eventually kind of polished it down to having about 10 really strong ideas that we felt represented the story that mean twix wanted to tell with all this.

8:52 So we got it signed off and that was sort of december the start of december 2021 so that one that just happened and the thing about that is with the name like capri songs you kind of want it to come out in capricorn season which is the end of december so the result we had to really kind of get our arse and gear with that.

9:11 And so this kind of launched us into one of the most intense prep weeks of all time a week of preparation for a video is kind of fine normally if you're doing one video but we were trying to do 10 in the space of five days so that meant that with the help of like our incredible producer alex chamberlain and my production company object and animal we basically had to you know go on location scouts and figure out shots with our dops but as well as that we had sort of go to archery practice and and twigs was learning about a million choreo routines and our art department was making like goat fetuses out of latex and we were setting up remote shoots in nigeria so those we're kind of doing all of this concurrently and trying to make it work.

9:56 And then when we started shooting it and just out of necessity and out of practicality we decided to focus on sections of songs like a chorus or a verse because that's really all we were able to shoot because yeah we were shooting about two or three ideas per day that didn't really mean we had a lot of time to you know chill out or figure out the best shot of things we kind of had to get it and go but yes we kind of got into this in december and then.

10:21 There was another outbreak of covid which kind of halted our production oh timed out really well great so that meant that we kind of had to shut down.

10:36 And then pick things back up in january and we were rearing to go and yeah yeah yep that's the paramedic assuring me that she hadn't died but yeah.

10:50 So we had to pick that up in january and obviously that kind of that was fine we kept going it just meant that we had a bit less time to do it and also a bit less budget to do it.

10:59 But we kept doing it and the other thing I did is it closed up our edit window a little bit but what was interesting about the edit it was already kind of an interesting challenge as I said things had kind of changed a bit from the original brief but we also weren't making a series of 10 music videos we had to figure out what these things were and how they existed twigs ended up calling them capri beds you know a cute name and and ultimately what we tried to do is you know some things were the way we shot them were focused on a section of the song so that kind of made sense and we did it like that with other ones we were trying to figure out how how we trimmed these things down or what we gave to it so rather than the conventional way of letting the musical track dictate the length of the video we did it the other way around and we kind of figured out what the action was of the video and then we used the music as more of a soundtrack so really they became a lot more like narrative advertising spots than they were music videos this sort of hideous game of tetris that I've got up here is actually how a lot of my edit sequences look because I really enjoy editing things in a really sort of explorative way it's kind of my chance to figure things out and play around with things so and funny enough it's obviously the way that I like to make things efficient storytelling it doesn't look that efficient but that is the kind of chance for me to become make it weird you know.

12:24 And so what I'd often do is find an idea and and we with that video we might have passed it over to another editor once we got the mood of it or I would stick with it the whole time.

12:37 And then make it ghastly and like add these hideous graphics to it and make it what it was and having that approach it kind of meant the each video had its own very specific visual identity but also I was able to kind of find a visual language which kind of existed throughout the whole series and it felt all part of one big thing I'm going to show you one of the videos well I'm going to show you a shortened version because I kind of wanted to talk about talk as much as I could so this one's a kind of shortened version of the first one of the first videos that came out.

13:13 And I felt like it kind of sorry my necklace just broke anyway um yeah I feel like this one kind of explained a lot of what the the the mood of capri songs was and what the what the kind of feeling was that we wanted to get across and it kind of straddles like performance art as well as music video and also a bit of sort of civil disobedience so I'll play this one for you now again it's shortened wow mama yes not quite given everything ♪

13:58 because when I feel you really want ♪

14:22 kiss me ♪

14:43 thank you thanks thanks very much the that one that filming that scared the out of me because we the intention of it was to get in trouble and we actually got into more trouble but that's in a kind of longer version of it which you can watch on the bus ride home or something.

15:06 So yeah I mean what what was interesting I thought is that you know we had a lot of intentions and there was a real intention behind every decision we made with each of these videos and I think at some point I would have loved to have explained all of those decisions to you and told you why we did everything but as the videos came out what I thought was actually a lot more interesting is what how fans started to respond to the videos and and basically the meanings that they were able to pull out of things themselves some of it was the things that we intended on doing and some of it was I guess stuff that we didn't really think about as much and and they were able to pull out the mythologies that they were interested in and kind of find their own odyssey within this sort of series and videos so that felt really special and it felt like I was doing something a teenage version of myself would have loved obviously you sometimes get comments like this thoughts let's read that out to you enough with the cat preveds if we don't get a full full video sometime soon I'm flipping tables I mean I count your blessings because originally we were just getting a couple tech talks but I feel really proud of this as a series and thank you so much for everyone to everyone for listening thank you so much