It's not a music video, but who cares? We still love Will Wightman's new short film - four minutes of high-octane comedy horror thrills, introducing one of the most ingenious monster creations of modern times. We discover the Blinkink director wanted to explore the potential of an unusual camera -and exorcise a few demons.Will Wightman is used to delivering extremes, and revelling in the genuinely gross, mainly for humourous purposes: he's the director who put a fly inside a man's brain for his one and only official music video for Irish DJ Tommy Holohan; he created a children's TV show where the puppet animals are skinned alive in Shop To Save Lives, for anti-fur charity PETA. Now for his latest short film, he has put a ingenious spin upon the extremely mundane, with fantastic results. And the starting point could hardly be more relatable. In what house or flatshare does the matter of kitchen cleanliness and, in particular, the state of the kitchen sink, not become an issue and occasionally, a point of conflict? Well, exactly. [vidtoken data:0]In This Place Is A Sh*thole, two twentysomethings are squabbling over the stage of the kitchen and realising they had not seen their otehr flatmate in several weeks, when are disturbed by noises in the black, greasy waters of the blocked sink. And then suddenly all hell breaks loose.Wightman's modus operandi in TPIAS is to ramp up to gripping action with as few preliminaries as possible. The white-knuckle suspense then arrives in the flatmates' fight for survival against the furry black beast, aka Mr Sticky.I've spent my adult life in soul-destroyingly disgusting shared flatsAnd his filmmaking instincts and craft are so impressive, from the brilliant character design of the cartoonishly terrifying beast to the orchestration of the action sequences, intensifying the visceral terror occuring in the confined space of the flat - by using a camera designed to for completely different purposes.So we spoke to Will Wightman about how he unleashed his monstrous comedy...[imgtoken data:1]Kitchen sink drama: Jamie (Paddy Young) and Will (Jack Shep) making a horrible discovery in This Place Is A Sh*thole PROMONEWS: Where did the idea come from? Disgust at the behaviour of flatmates? Guilt at your own lack of cleanliness? Horror at the idea of flatsharing? All or none of the above...?WILL WIGHTMAN: Having spent my entire adult life in mind-boggingly expensive, soul-destroyingly disgusting shared flats, This Place is a Sh*thole was part creative experiment, part therapy. I wanted to make something that captured the frustration of living somewhere that’s simply not designed for the number of people that occupy it, and also tap into the claustrophobic horror that comes from your home feeling so disgusting and out of your control.[imgtoken data:2]Grease beast: Mr Sticky (Robin Berry) is drawn from the plughole by the allure of a bag of Pom-Bears For me, the monster represents not just the culmination of all the filth in that flat but the resentment that grows over time when your flatmate keeps leaving the fucking stupid bins by the fucking stupid door. I hope people will watch it and remember that they’re not alone.When did you get the idea? And how long did it take to get the script into shape, that you felt ready to film?WW: The story is so simple that the script was actually the easy bit really. It lives and dies in the quality of the set pieces, which mostly comes down to the camera and blocking. So the previs was really how we figured out when this film was ready to make.[imgtoken data:3]Was there any particular influences or inspiration in the way you made it?WW: Bad Will Hunting by Will and Danny Madden was a big inspo for me. It was a lo-fi lockdown film that has this amazing action, humour and energy. That was the vibe I wanted to have for this, combined with some proper creature feature-style scares.How did you create the Grease Monster? Did it go through various incarnations before you arrived at the final version? And how much did you make of him for real?WW: We made a costume! That’s what you see on screen pretty much all the way through, except for the spawning scene and the end moment, where we’ve combined footage of the monster with comp work.[imgtoken data:4]I wrote this with the 360 camera in mind, so the story really played into the camera's strengths.Creatively, I wanted a creature that embodied the horrible shit that we find in our plugholes with a design that left enough to the imagination so its origin felt ambiguous. Practically, though, this was a passion project that we made on a shoestring budget, so we needed a creature design that was effective but also simple. That way, we could channel what little resources we had into the right places.I did the designs in Photoshop, then Lani Hernandez, our stupidly talented costume designer, bought a gorilla costume and sculpted a new face and hands for it. Then, we covered all of the fur with disgusting things you might find in your sink. I still have the costume, and let me tell you, it stinks.[imgtoken data:5]Above: Will Wightman (top) with fictional Will (Jack Shep) on set As for performance, I wanted this creature to be utterly relentless, like a wild animal. A rapid chimp was the description we kept coming back to on set. For me, both the humour and horror of the creature came from its manic, unrelenting energy. The kind of creature that will bang its head against a wall for three days straight if that’s what it takes to get through.This was a passion project - we needed creature design that was effective but also simple. The excitement and humour of the film comes from the way the story is told - the economy of the shots and the pace of the edit. Is that in your head at the start or a trial and error process?WW: Much of that comes from the way we shot the action on a 360 camera. Typically, the ways 360 cameras are used are quite limited. They’re used a lot in videography for action shots, time-lapses or general vlogging purposes. Most people associate them with those ‘tiny planet’ or ‘black hole’ shots, which can be super cool, but feel quite overdone these days.[imgtoken data:6]Above: prosthetics artist Ruth Pease, assistant Sarah Jane Pucci, and friendI used a 360 camera on a commercial shoot a good few years ago and immediately got excited about the untapped possibilities. Blinkink had one lying around in the studio, so me and my DoP Will Marchant started experimenting with it in our spare time to test the camera’s limits.Fairly quickly, it became clear that there were lots of things the camera couldn’t do, but once in a while, we’d get something that looked totally unique and really interesting, which spurred us on to try more things out.Slowly but surely, we refined this aesthetic. Then, I wrote TPISH with the 360 camera in mind, so the story really played into the camera's strengths.[imgtoken data:7]I still have the costume, and let me tell you, it stinks.What was the best part and the worst part of making This Place? WW: Truthfully, I think this shoot was maybe the most fun I’ve ever had on set. I had such a clear plan of what each shot was by the time we came to filming, that everything was super smooth. What’s more, the camera is so compact that we could shoot so quickly. It also helped having a small but insanely talented cast and crew, made up of some of my all-time favourite people.That being said, we struggled with the technical capabilities of the camera. At the end of the day, the camera and its software are consumer products, so they struggled a little sometimes with the quantity of footage and speed we wanted to work at. We also had a very angry neighbour in the flat below, so we had to film the whole thing in our socks and stick and towels in the doors so they didn’t slam. Thankfully, I’ve moved out now and she hasn’t figured out where I live… Yet.• Will Wightman is a director with Blinkink; watch more of his work here

The documentary maker opens event to mark the publication of book celebrating Academy’s work over four decades – and shows how music videos mirror society in ways that journalism and other media cannot. Report by Albie Fay.On Tuesday, 18th November, the ICA in London was the venue for an event that brought together filmmakers across generations to reflect on the evolution of the music video.Organised in tandem with the publication of Short Form: 40 Years of Music Videos, Ads, and the Art of Moving Images – a book recently published by MACK Books devoted to work produced by leading London production company Academy Films over the past four decades – it brought together two of the company’s most eminent directors, Jonathan Glazer and Walter Stern, with emerging directing talent Iris Luz, on stage for a discussion that focussed largely upon the importance of music videos in their careers.The evening began with the documentary maker Adam Curtis - renowned for his iconoclastic docs including The Power Of Nightmares, Hypernormalisation and Shifty – offering his own views on the medium. He did so in the characteristic personalised style of his films, giving an illustrated lecture that moved through a selection of videos from early iterations of K-Pop (then called dance pop), to Eminem’s Stan and early 2000s MTV.[imgtoken data:1]Above: Adam Curtis (left) with panel moderator Simran Hans at Short Form: 40 Years of Music Videos, Ads, and the Art of Moving Images event at the ICA on 18th November. Curtis’s theme was how music videos uniquely capture the “underlying mood of a society” in ways journalism – or any other medium, for that matter – cannot. He argued that the form transmits across a language of “light, feeling, and emotion” that allows it to act as a more immediate social and political barometer. To illustrate this, he highlighted videos like Walter Stern’s work for Audiobully’s with We Don’t Care, to show how the form captured the "dislocation and confusion" of the early Noughties.Later, he connected the emergence of early K-Pop videos to the complex political and economic dilemmas in South Korea at the time, arguing that their visual output channeled a desire for solidarity that formal political systems had failed to provide.Following Curtis’ talk, film critic Simran Hans led a panel of Glazer, Stern and Luz, through a discussion that spanned the highs of MTV through to today’s more DIY and digital filmmaking.Both Glazer and Stern reflected on the 1990s shift from label-controlled performance clips to directors starting to create miniature films of their own, like Stern’s direction of the Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, or Glazer’s video for Radiohead’s Karma Police.[imgtoken data:2]Above: Walter Stern (left) and Jonathan Glazer on the panel at the Short Form event at the ICA. Jonathan Glazer spoke about the DVD boom era, in the late Nineties, where readily available and obscure films were influencing the creativity of music videos. He added he can still see “the influence that the music videos have had” on his feature films – a subtle reminder that the medium’s experimentation itself bleeds into wider visual culture.Walter Stern explained that for him, the artistic process is about “finding one image that holds the emotional weight of a track and following that image wherever it leads”.Curtis argued music videos transmit across a language of 'light, feeling, and emotion' that allows it to act as a more immediate social and political barometer. He also noted that music videos offered a unique form of experimentation. “You can do something in a music video that you can’t do in a feature or a commercial, where formats are more rigid,” said Stern, adding: “It helps that the videos are only three and a half minutes long. They don’t demand as much from the audience either.”Iris Luz brought a more contemporary perspective than the two Academy Films veterans. She spoke about smaller crews, iPhone footage, and the importance of intimacy, where immediacy is a way of enforcing a togetherness between artist and audience.[imgtoken data:3]Above: Iris Luz (right) with panel moderator Simran Hans Referencing the DIY approaches of new wave artists like Fred Again and FakeMink, Luz described how reality and low-tech aesthetics now shape the emotion of music videos, and therefore their reception, something increasingly filtered through YouTube algorithms and clips on TikTok. "The main trait that I see in their visual output is an immediacy which tries to enforce a feeling of intimacy with the music that they're putting out," she said.However, all four speakers were in alignment in their shared view that the music video sits at the centre of our visual culture, not at its edges, due to the fact that the form reacts quickly to shifts in technology and taste, recording the underlying political and emotional feelings of its moment.Jonathan Glazer closed the discussion with the observation that the algorithm may influence what we see, “but it doesn’t change how we view the work”, and he declared that the role of the director has remained unchanged through the decades.“To make powerful work, radical work, no matter the reach,” he said.• Academy Films’ new book, Short Form: 40 Years of Music Videos, Ads, and the Art of Moving Images (MACK Books), is on sale now at the MACK website and good bookshops.

Singer-songwriter, producer and director Wesley Joseph returns with a comeback single and accompanying visual that adds a sleek intensity to the craft and surreal invention that has marked his work to date.Shadowy, concrete club spaces and mirrored rooms twist and warp as Wesley encounters a striking female amid a group of pole dancers in the video for If Time Could Talk. And it builds to an impressive, fiery climax.Filmed in Paris, and produced by Stink France (with help from film fund CNC), Joseph's video for If Time Could Talk is riveting in terms of the imagery he creates and the feeling it evokes - which is something he certainly intended to achieve, from hearing how he describes the track."It started as a much faster dance instrumental but one night, weeks after the session, I slowed it down and found all this space in the music where the feeling and texture became clear - electric, nostalgic, twisted, and aching all at once,” he explains."Ultimately the song is about the pull of a lost connection, desire, regret and romanticising the past - some of the songs I write have a really specific story and others are a feeling dramatised into a scene and If Time Could Talk feels more like that - emotional honesty, immediacy and melancholy all wrapped into an elated escape.”[imgtoken data:1] [imgtoken data:2]

A new short film by British Nigerian director Renee Maria Osubu, In-Between – made in partnership by Coldplay and Choose Love – explores how relationships are affected by migration.Shot in Malta and Kenya and set to music from Coldplay’s 2024 album Moon Music, the film focusses on the story of Omar, a young refugee from Ethiopia, who is navigating life in Malta. Anchored by his East African community in Malta and phone calls across continents, Omar is suspended between two worlds: the home he misses and the one he is trying to make.The 12-minute hybrid short was predominantly cast with immigrants and refugees - all of whom were paid for their roles.The Somesuch production was supported by two refugee-focused organisations, SPARK 15 and RAAH.[imgtoken data:1][imgtoken data:2]