Folk Radio UK is proud to be the first to present Arborea’s new video for Wolves from their latest album ‘Red Planet‘, released by Strange Attractors Audio House 2011. Arborea are a husband and wife duo (Shanti and Buck Curran), they made this film between them and had the help of a couple of friends to play parts in the video.
The film is filled with abstract imagery that is deeply rooted in female energy and folklore which gives it a very magical and fairy-tale like quality. Considering they made all this on a very simple camera the size of a cell phone is incredible.
We spoke to Shanti about the making of the film:
I made it a year and a half ago during a few days in the summer here in Maine. The color scenes with the spinning wheel were shot in one hour – the sun was setting and we were in a hurry because the wheel was being sold the next morning. The woman spinning is named Iris Knight and she was just amazing to work with- she has a natural magic about her. We trudged through a huge field and disgustingly enough there were thousands of tiny slugs on the blades of grass that fell as we brushed past them and landed in our shoes.
Part two, the black and white scenes were me and my friend Katie Goodrow and buck helped to film those scenes. We did that over two different days in another field and in the forest.
The concept is really abstract, Iris collects wool from the field, the wool represents elements of a story or tale that she spins and weaves together. Katie is dressed in white and I am in black, we represent the wind and the shadow and sometimes we are together and sometimes I am looking for her, she paints a symbol in the woods and I find it. Katie was a good sport about the filming, I made her spin around alot and she was eaten by mosquitoes in the woods. Both the ladies lent me the use of themselves and their time for free and were so fun to work with….So then Iris takes the story apart and spreads it back among the field. It’s more of a visual thing, with heavy symbolism but that’s about it.
I spent a very long time editing it, and it was accepted into a film festival but then I had doubts and second thoughts about it so I pulled it from the festival. I’m not a filmmaker and I wasn’t trying to say anything specific and important, I just wanted to make a film that was strong in female energy and imagery. Also, the camera was tiny (cell phone size) that we made all the other videos with so the strobe light effect at the end in the field was just an accident of the lens trying to adjust to the light, I couldn’t edit it out so it just has to stay. I’m hoping to upgrade my camera in the new year some time but for now we work with what we have.
Links
To find out more and to also help support Arborea who rely on the support of fans to tour and produce such wonderful music go to:
arboreamusic.blogspot.com