Fresh from winning Best Budget Video (Pop/Dance/Urban) for his work on Speech Debelle’s The Key, director Anthony Dickenson delivers more stunning work with Groove Armada’s first release for Cooking Vinyl. Filmed at the club Fire in Vauxhall, this very cool ‘tripping the light fantastic’ extravaganza goes hand in hand with the poptastic I Won’t Kneel.

Groove Armada
I Won’t Kneel (Cooking Vinyl)
Director: Anthony Dickenson
Producer: Hannah Chandler
Production Company: Pulse Films
Representation: OBmanagement
Editor: Joe Randall Cutler
Colourist: Simone Grattarola
DoP: Robbie Ryan
Art Director: Sarah Jenneson
Beauty Work / After Effects: Dan Sollis
Commissioner: Rob Collins
Watch: Quicktime movie

Anthony Dickenson on making the video for Groove Armada’s I Won’t Kneel

“I really wanted to make a strong beauty piece for this track. Becky, the singer needed to be heavily featured so the plan was to envelop her in an environment that wouldn’t only produce that flattering light but also help create a progression in my somewhat obscure narrative.

“I had a location in mind called Fire in Vauxhall that I had been trying to work into a treatment for a while. It’s a club with a backroom called The Lightbox. This space has an arched ceiling made up of over 1000 programmable LED’s. It is pretty impressive to look at but even more impressive on film. So with only a couple of days to prep I set about trying organize the programming of this light ceiling so that it felt entirely synched with the track. Dan Solis did a fantastic job of putting it all together in After Effects but due to time constraints we were still putting the finishing touches to the sequence at 4am on the day of the shoot. All part of the fun.

“We arrived at the club at 7.30am and were completely freaked out by the sight of sweaty clubbers, flyer packs and a string of bouncers waiting to eject the last few stragglers from our location. Pumping techno was still echoing around the almost empty space. This was a Friday morning by the way. Anyway we got on with it and by 8 the space was completely ours.

“I was lucky enough to have the extremely talented Robbie Ryan on board as my DoP and after my producer Hannah had skillfully managed to acquire everything on his lighting list with our limited budget we ended up using none of it. Everything in this promo is lit by the LEDs. Me and Robbie are particularly proud of that. Ha ha.

“The day ran smoothly and Becky was absolutely awesome to work with. She was very responsive to direction and very patient. This was important because we had a technical issue, which meant we could not sync the lightwall footage directly to the track. This meant I had to freestyle it a little on the LED control desk to make it seem more in sync. It was great standing in the DJ booth watching my monitor while fading in and out crazy preset lighting patterns to the track. I felt like a super star VJ!

“The video is split into two sections. During the first half I wanted it to feel quite dreamy and intimate while trying to avoid revealing the space around Becky too much. In the second half I wanted her to really look like she was interacting with the lighting, almost pushing and pulling it around. The lighting patterns had to appear to be emanating from her touch. It was really important to me that I let my DOP go to town on this. Robbie really pulled out all the clever lens trickery that I think adds a whole other layer to this video. Mad props.”

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