The return of the Guillemots with The Basket – first single from long-awaited third album Walk The River – heralds a blast of extreme weirdness down in the woods from Tom Kingsley, his first video in a while too, after impressing so much with Darwin Deez and others last year.

It’s a very psychedelic camping trip which starts with the band airborne and zooming very fast and rather disturbingly among the trees – great work by Chris Bristow at Munky – and then gets even more strange. “That’s what you get when you mix the Evil Dead with 2001 and add Fyfe Dangerfield in a tent,” says Tom.

Guillemots
The Basket (Geffen / Polydor)
Director/Editor/Producer: Tom Kingsley
After Effects: Chris Bristow at Munky
Production Manager: Beatrice Warren
Exec Producer: Tamsin Glasson
Production Company: Colonel Blimp
DOP/Steadicam: James Moriarty
B Camera: Sophia di Martino
DIT: Chris Wardle
1st AD: George Nelson
Hair + Makeup: Sally Marshall
Wardrobe: Simone Sylvester
Runners: James Eliot and Sam Cochrane
Commissioner: CJ Hassay
Watch: Quicktime movie

Tom Kingsley on making the video for Guillemots’ The Basket

“Like most music videos, we had several months prep and sixty grand at our disposal – no questions asked. So we shot on the Harry Potter forest set with James Cameron’s new IMAX 3D camera system. For modesty’s sake, we post-converted to 2D 7D. And then Munky’s After Effects guru Chris Bristow did beautiful post work all night every night for a week. The video literally wouldn’t have been possible without him.

“The shoot day was very fast and very fun, with James Moriarty heroically doing his own steadicam and engineering his own crane by magic-arming a 7D onto a pole. Everyone mucked in – we even got CJ the commissioner holding poly boards and rigging the flimsy tent.

“There were a couple of problems, sure. For starters, I overslept, and turned up 45 minutes late. The cheap speakers I’d brought from home to save money turned out to be so pitifully quiet that Sally, who was doing hair and make-up, had to park her car just offscreen, and play the song on that.

“In the last shot of the day, MC the guitarist got a flare fired straight into his eye. I kept the shot where that happens in the video. Blink and you’ll miss it. If only he had done the same.”

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