Constant Ships (from A Minor Revival)

Director: Adrian Holmes

Director’s Statement

The idea for the Constant Ships clip came probably a few weeks before I heard the song. I was back in my hometown of Perth, Western Australia and I was standing on a sort of sandy cliff top that drops off into the Indian Ocean. I was looking at the sea being ruffled, shaken up by a 18 or 20 knot onshore wind. The wind comes in pretty much every afternoon there and it almost always comes from the southwest. There was a fair bit of swell under the wind chop too, so conditions were pretty tough. About a kilometre offshore was a small boat, a pretty old small boat, wooden hull, enclosed cabin area. The boat was heading to the river mouth about three kÂ’s further south, so it was headed almost straight into the teeth of the wind, and it was doing it hard. It was rising up the jagged lines of swell and whacking down on the other side sending white spray and foam out sideways which the wind would get hold of and rip away from the bow. It was compelling. The boat was literally inching into the weather, making very small progress, but progress nonetheless. It was itÂ’s sheer persistence that I guess I found so striking, and the almost metronomic rhythm of it rising and falling.

The image stuck in my head. A few weeks later I was at a Sodastream gig in Melbourne, my adopted town, and Karl introduced Constant Ships as a new song theyÂ’d been working on. IÂ’ve been a big fan of Sodastream for a number of years, and IÂ’ve been taken to wonderful places by their music in the past. Even so, there was something I felt that was extraordinary about this song and it immediately captured me. I think I even said something to Karl about it afterwards. The song stuck with me in the same sort of way as the image of the boat did and I guess in the way that these things happen, they started to draw themselves towards each other.

I was really stoked when Karl and Pete asked me to put together a clip for the song. IÂ’d so much enjoyed making the clip for Heaven on the Ground. Their music really lends itself to image in lots of different ways. If there was one thing I was concerned about it was that the song was so majestic and emotional, so grand and epic, that I knew the images would have to be similarly so without competing or drawing anything away from the music.

My girlfriendÂ’s father is quite an accomplished sailor. HeÂ’s competed in many Bluewater, or ocean races, and around that time heÂ’d given me a book to read on a yacht race that went into massive seas in 1998 Â– the Sydney to Hobart race. The fleet sailed into what they like to call a Â‘Hundred Year StormÂ’, the sort of storm that nature likes to throw up every hundred years or so just to let us know that there are conditions on this plant even we canÂ’t tame. Unbelievable seas, 100 foot waves. Difficult to imagine even when youÂ’re looking at footage of it.

I knew that the clip needed to have images with that sort of gravity, that sort of scale, and I knew it would cost us a hell of a lot to shoot, so I contacted the archive department of the ABC, our national broadcaster, to see what they had. I knew from reading that book that they were pretty much the only station to send helicopters out into the madness of the storm and that they had some pretty amazing footage of the rescues and huge seas. They sent me a few hours of footage and I sort of trawled through it looking for images that might work. In the end I settled on these images because I felt they came closest to how I first imagined the clip.

When I first layed up the vision I was really amazed at the sort of synchronicity between the image and the song. So many small things timed together, so many little sprays of water happened on cymbal notes, so many rises and dips fell in with PeteÂ’s bowing. It felt just right to me. I made a copy, took it home and watched it a few times, and the more I watched it, the more sense it made. I guess on first viewing there is always the anticipation of a cut, an edit. ItÂ’s like youÂ’re waiting for something to happen, and it never does really. And once youÂ’ve seen it, the next viewing you can relax with the image a little more and start to get into the small detail stuff: the guy sleeping on deck, the loose flapping edge of the mainsail, the dark swell rising.

It was then a question of trying to work out how much the ABC was going to charge for the footage. I just assumed that it would be a reasonable amount for our budget, but when they sent us the quote it was about 5 times more expensive than I had anticipated, and about 7 times more than we could afford. It was bloody hard to take, especially because I was pretty excited about the song and the clip, and IÂ’d been working on it for ages and called in quite a few favours to cut it.

I was working at the time with a bunch of people and one of the guys started a lotto syndicate up. Basically we all coughed up 10 dollars a week and he put the numbers in on a Friday afternoon. WeÂ’d been playing all year and hadnÂ’t won anything, then to everyoneÂ’s amazement, we won second division, two weeks in a row. Each member ended up with about 1300 hundred dollars each, it was great. I knew then that if we hassled the ABC we could probably beat them down to a price for the footage that would be low enough for us to afford if we used the lotto winnings, which is what happened.

IÂ’m really glad itÂ’s turned out this way. ItÂ’s great for the clip to be out there so people can see it. ItÂ’s an unusual clip and I suppose itÂ’s pretty different to most other clips where the band is in it or there are a lot of girls dancing around in slow motion, but IÂ’m really happy with it and I really hope other people are too. ItÂ’s the kind of clip I hope people will get drawn into and for the five minutes of the song, be taken somewhere by Karl and PeteÂ’s music.

Adrian Holmes is a director and film maker who resides in Melbourne, Australia. He previously directed the film clip for SodastreamÂ’s song Â‘Heaven on the GroundÂ’ which received extensive airplay from the MTV network throughout Europe and the MTV2 network in the USA.