Spy Films have appointed Debs Herbert at Y-i London as the company’s music video directors representative in the UK.

Spy, founded in Toronto and now with recently-established offices in New York and LA, have recruited Debs Herbert to represent the company’s core promo directors including Asif Mian, George Vale, Chris Grismer, Steve Jocz, the Duplex, Neill Blomkamp and Aliaksei Tserakhau.

New York-based Asif Mian’s work includes videos for The Roots and Russian Futurists and designing a live visual show for MIA. His latest video is the acclaimed, wittily surreal clip for Woodhands’ I Wasn’t Made For Fighting (see below).

George Vale is a director-cameraman who recently DoP’d a live concert for Feist and directed a performance video for Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning. Chris Grismer is returning to promos having just shot his second feature, Lock And Roll Forever. Steve Jocz is the drummer of pop punk outfit Sum 41, who’s also directed videos for Midway State, The Operation and McFly. The Duplex is director Dave Pawsey and visual effects supervisor Jonathan Legris, whose latest of three videos for Sam Roberts is Detroit 67.

Neill Blomkamp, director of ads for Nike and Citroen’s award-winning Alive With Technology, has been working with Peter Jackson on a new sci-fi film District 9 for the past two years but will be available for short form projects from early 2009.

Belarussian Aliaksei Tserakhau reached wide attention for his acclaimed video for Lyapis Trubetskoy’s Capital, has since moved from Moscow to Toronto and just won best animated video and the Vimus International Music Video Festival for his latest Lyapis Trubetskoy video, Lights (right).

Spy Films’ executive producer Richard Cureton says, “With our new partnership with Y-i, we hope to make the gap between the UK and North America a little bit easier to bridge and would love the opportunity to host our British friends on this side of the pond.”

Other directors represented by Spy in North America are with other companies in the UK. For example, Jaron Albertin is represented by Rokkit, while Vincent Morisset is with Warp Films.

Asif Main on making the video for Woodhands’ I Wasn’t Made For Fighting

“Taking inspiration from the lyric ‘one more time’ from the chorus of the song, the idea became about repeating the events of a day and subsequently having the guys find out that they can manipulate the (time-frozen) people they are encountering again.

“This led to a host of ideas, situations and visually abstracted scenes that kept escalating this idea of frozen, manipulated time. Simply, I thought I could make exciting images using this concept/story.

“As usual, I like mostly everything in-camera, so a lot of rigging with fishing line, wire, hairspray and custom-made stands & rigs were used to manipulate people and props. It really was a process of the concept meeting directing actors, consistent lighting, art direction tricks and post refinement in order to create and accentuate this distilled mood.”

Woodhands
I Wasn’t Made For Fighting (Paper Bag Records)
Prod co: Spy Films
Director: Asif Mian
Producer: Rich Hutchins
DoP: Zak Mulligan
Editor: Tin Malieckal/Asif Mian
VFX: EVAQ Studio
Watch: Quicktime movie