Riff Raff Films

Director

Ben Reed

In Ewan Jones Morris&#39;s last&nbsp;video for&nbsp;Anna Meredith the frame&nbsp;is filled with rows of smaller images showing variations of everyday things -&nbsp;an excellent way to express the complex&nbsp;layers of her music. Now he&#39;s gone much further.For Dowager, this mosaic becomes&nbsp;a mad scramble&nbsp;of vintage art books, notebooks, photos and charging phones&nbsp;where each element is animated or contains live performance by members of Meredith&#39;s band.Then the imagery migrates to a flow of digital windows on a computer screen, where the performers vie with constantly changing clip art. Again&nbsp;each element is individually animated. A near-insane task brilliantly achieved by Jones Morris to reflect the sophistication of Meredith&#39;s music.

Ewan Jones Morris

Nev Pecotic

Anna Meredith 'Dowager' by Ewan Jones Morris

"Dowager" Anna Meredith

Ben Reed delivers an artful piece of monochromatic mastery for Dusky.Shot in an ice factory in Thailand, the video takes an unseen and rarely considered industry and turns it into a hyper-stylised art. The monochrome negative footage and extreme close-ups give the video a series of textures that would otherwise likely be missed. Elements of the video feel almost ceremonial - as though we&#39;re voyeurs to a ritual we know nothing about.

Amber Millington

Natalie Arnett

Nic Booth

Krissada Keangkrivanich

Atipat Panyai

Leila Sarraf

Trim Editing

Richard Fearon

Hanan Cher

Undercranked

Dusky ft. Wiley 'Sort It Out Sharon' by Ben Reed

This is plainly hilarious.Ben Reed&#39;s new video for Infinity Ink&#39;s Full Capacity begins with a title card that reads&nbsp;&#39;Shadwell &amp; Anners Security and Community Theatre Presents Full Capacity or: The Raver Whose Brain Escaped&#39;. Frankly, I&#39;m already 100% sold.Of course there is more.&nbsp;A 4:3 aspect ratio, a low-rent theatre setting, a caveman and four bouncers. It feels like a crazed development on Reed&#39;s Blur video from last year, but his commitment to going fully-strange with it pays off with surreal comic moments piled on top of one another.Ben Reed incorporates wigs, talking brains and&nbsp;chairs in lieu of horses, to tell the tale that, on the face of it, appears to be about&nbsp;a man unable to enter a nightclub. But really this is a story about life, death and&nbsp;the vital minutiae of everything in between.Okay, not really - but it is very funny.

United Kingdom

Matt Posner

Matthew Fone

Joceline Gabriel

Dance

Infinity Ink 'Full Capacity' by Ben Reed

Infinity Ink - Full Capacity

Ben Reed has created an irreverent performance&nbsp;video&nbsp;for George Ezra&rsquo;s Barcelona, where at times its difficult to make out the velvet-voiced&nbsp;singer in all the undergrowth, and others where he is impossible to miss.Shot over two days, the video finds Ezra amongst the&nbsp;varied flora at&nbsp;The Eden Project - but at first he&#39;s hardly visible at all. It&#39;s&nbsp;a unique take on a performance video, shot in&nbsp;monster zooms giving the piece a warm,&nbsp;individual aesthetic&nbsp;capturing George in candid and uncontrived manner against the lush&nbsp;backdrop.

Katie Lambert

Sarah Boardman

Casper Campbell

Ruth Higginbotham

Elizabeth Doonan

Sony Music

James Rose

Cut+Run

Singer-songwriter

George Ezra 'Barcelona' by Ben Reed

George-Ezra-'Barcelona'-by-Ben-Reed

Ben Reed matches Blur in full-on Britpop mode with the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfcld.org/" target="_blank">Phoenix Fly Line Dancing Group Of San Francisco</a>, in his very charming promo for Lonesome Street, from the band&#39;s new album&nbsp;The Magic Whip.&nbsp;Ben&#39;s ability to find interesting and&nbsp;surprising imagery to bond with the track at hand is much in evidence in a video which&nbsp;starts with a single performer&nbsp;- Philip from the aforementioned&nbsp;San Francisco-based fitness class - and his boombox,&nbsp;eventually&nbsp;joined by a female partner, and finally backed by a&nbsp;whole gymnasium of Chinese line dancers.&nbsp;A meeting of East and West that works delightfully...

Jonny Kight

Irma Kollar

Sam Clayton

Drew Bienneman

Zack Kertesz

Joe Mullen

Jona Tochet

Charlie Moreton

Work Editorial

Houmam Abdallah

Electric Theatre Collective

Arianna Maniscalco

Phoenix Fly Line Dancing Group Of San Francisco

William Nichols

Parlophone

Britpop

Blur 'Lonesome Street' by Ben Reed

Blur-'Lonesome-Street'-by-Ben-Reed

Ben Reed follows a particularly gung-ho bunch of stormchasers in Oklahoma for the benefit of Tchami&#39;s dance hit Promesses.&nbsp;Tchami&#39;s spelling is clearly not all that, and we&#39;re not too sure about Ben&#39;s explanation for the video either.&quot;The song&#39;s kind of about storms and I&#39;d remembered from when I was in school this boy who&#39;d been struck by lightning, and like a week after it happened he punched my friend Harris so hard in the face his eye socket shattered, and we were all in awe, like, he was so tough, tougher than he was before, and by the time he finished school he was the tallest boy in the year. I think he&#39;s like one of those door to door mormons now with the brown suits and bicycles. I still wouldn&#39;t fuck with him though.&quot;The video was inspired by him and a footnote in Lee Trevino&#39;s biography where he mentions he met a priest who encouraged members of his parish to get struck by lightning. I think most of them died though.&quot;&nbsp;Ben is obviously having a bit of a laugh.&nbsp;No way did he ever have a friend called Harris.

Bunee Tomlinson

Alexander Brou

Yusuke Tateishi

Big Buoy

Emily Ann Sonnet

Ministry of Sound

Steven Farnsworth

Tchami 'Promesses' by Ben Reed

Tchami - Promesses [Directors Cut]

A clever promo is an engaging promo, a mantra Ben Reed has taken to heart for the video for Joan As Policewoman&#39;s Witness. And this is certainly clever, and well executed. It starts as a study of sign language, which develops into a visual language that does the same thing - images that reflect words of the songAnd taking inspiration from TV detective shows with its hard hitting (and occasionally oddball) imagery &ndash; nicely photographed by Nic Booth &ndash;&nbsp;it&nbsp;also follows the&nbsp;law-and-order&nbsp;metaphor at the heart of Witness.&nbsp;Its Ben&#39;s third video for Joan and the first one without her participation. And despite this success he says that was &quot;a shame, as she has charm and wit.&quot;&nbsp;

Sean Mayo

Ioan Gwyn

PIAS

Joan As Police Woman 'Witness' by Ben Reed

Joan As Police Woman - Witness

It's not so unusual for Ben Reed to come up with imaginative ideas bordering on the bizarre. His last video of 2012 was for <a href="http://www.hsilondon.co.uk.php5-20.dfw1-1.websitetestlink.com/cat/music-videos/director/reed-ben/the-jelas---you-want-the-pink-moon-on-a-stick-1402" target="_blank">The Jelas's You Want The Pink Moon On A Stick</a>, in which Ben told the harrowing tale of a global vomiting epidemic by inking and scratching over 8,000 vintage 35mm slides. 
And now he's excelled himself with the Local Natives video for Heavy Feet. It's the story of Llewellyn (70), Griffith (71) and Michael (63), who together make up the Llandow Visually Impaired Harriers - "Western Europe's only blind synchronised model plane flying team."
Ben brings us inside their world - from painting their model planes, to practicing their display, to their climactic performance - with the musical accompaniment of a singing avocado, spinach, rocket and tomato sandwich. Yes indeed. And hence the need in the crew for a 'Sandwich Operator'. Only could happen, one suspects, on a Ben Reed shoot...

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=h2zWfxW60z0

Ryan Drawbridge

Simona Harrison

Beth Montague, Gareth Thomas

Connie Meade

Local Natives 'Heavy Feet' by Ben Reed

Local-Natives-'Heavy-Feet'-by-Ben-Reed

Following up the superb comic surrealism of the long video-cum-short film <a href="http://www.promonews.tv/2012/05/24/when-spector-met-henry-kelly-by-ben-reed/" target="_blank">When Spector Met Henry Kelly</a>, Ben Reed now teams up with Spector for an unsettling, daring proper video for Never Fade Away. 
Shot as if part of some Japanese horror movie featuring the band being kidnapped by feral school kids a la Battle Royale, Spector and Ben Reed also get meta from the start: the video is comprised of slight variations on the same sequence - which looks like its been recorded onto the same thirty second strip of VHS tape.
The results are predictable for those who can still dimly remember this revolutionary, late lamented format. The image continues to degrade and degenerate throughout the course of the video.

HSI London

Thomas English

Rebecca Gore

Eve Marie Coles

Sam Seager

Spector 'Never Fade Away' by Ben Reed

Here's Ben Reed's film about up and comers Spector meeting 'former TV presenter Henry Kelly' - a rendezvous borne from their mutual admiration...
A distinctive entertainment that Ben created for Fiction Records and Channel 4, and transmitted last week.

Dom Corbisiero

Gareth Thomas

Beth Montague

When Spector Met Henry Kelly, by Ben Reed

When-Spector-Met-Henry-Kelly,-by-Ben-Reed

Just an everyday story of a teenage wannabe Freddie Mercury impersonator and her gay grandfathers, set in Port Talbot on 26th October 1988 - that's Ben Reed's video for Clock Opera's Man Made... 
Very quirky it is too - involving a trip to the coast, masks made of pancakes, and a disquieting denouement...

Mark Holowenia

Dermott John

Mike Mooney

Clock Opera 'Man Made' by Ben Reed

Oxford five-piece The Fixers set off in a magical boat to find a cure for Grandad's curious cereal affliction in Ben Reed's wonderfully bizarre promo for Iron Deer Dream. 
As Grandad's condition worsens, vegetables start sprouting from various parts of his body. Thankfully, a jelly cactus from a far off land appears to hold the key...

Nick Booth

David Curtis

Hannah Glossop

Sam Reed

The Fixers 'Iron Deer Dream' by Ben Reed

Ben Reed's video for Michael Kiwanuka's rather lovely Home Again is a simple performance video, shot on 35mm - and then Ben took the neg and painstakingly painted the frames himself, all in sync to the music. Consequently, Ben wasn't able to actually see what he'd done until he sat in the TK suite, hours before delivery. 
"My references were really the filmmakers Len Lye and Stan Brakage, and I kind of wanted to combine their old school scratched film technique with a really simple black and white performance," says Ben.
"I think I spent four days painting, scratching and inking on a home made light box with the film strung up between two microphone stands. It was kind of trial and error, but really minus the trial, so pretty nerve-racking. 
"Watching the video for the first time at the telecine was horrific, I hadn't slept and was clinging on the yucca plant in the corner asking it if it was in sync. It said it couldn't see the through the pack of twenty Bensons I'd just lit in my mouth. But seriously, yeah it was pretty scary."

Tom Allan

Elizabeth Cardwell

Niki Henry

Michael Kiwanuka 'Home Again' by Ben Reed

Ben Reed's low budget video for Apparat's post-rocky Black Water features three impressively imposing (and occasionally smoking) 14 foot high sculptures of vintage furniture, in the middle of nowhere.

Cyrus Mirza

Apparat 'Black Water' by Ben Reed

Apparat-'Black-Water'-by-Ben-Reed

In the absence of the artist Ben Reed gets creative with words (and not for the first time - remember Wave Pictures' <a href="http://www.promonews.tv/2010/07/29/bug-20-the-wave-pictures%E2%80%99-sweetheart-by-ben-reed/" target="_blank">Sweetheart</a>) for Josh Radin's I Missed You - and a few photos of Josh.
Ben: "It was another very long and hot summer weekend spent in a blacked out room blasting lights at small objects. Although it was a pretty educational video for me; not only did I learn how to use autoCAD, I found out which body parts shouldn't go in a laser-cutter and became an encyclopedia on varieties and uses of all domestic and industrial foams. After the shoot I found I can recognise helvetica in 53 different languages from a distance of 30 feet."

Josh Radin 'I Missed You' by Ben Reed

A new Joan As Policewoman video by Ben Reed (following The Magic) and it's an everyday story of Joan falling in love with a werewolf - who's the team mascot of a violent and abusive women's football team (who wear Grouch Marx disguises). These things happen in Wales.
"It was meant to look like an American 70's indie film, all bathed in a golden glow with big romantic lens flares," Ben explains, exclusively to Promo News. "But it rained all day so it looks like Kes. Which is probably more absurd and for my tastes better."

Steve Owen

John Moule

Joan As Police Woman 'Chemmie' by Ben Reed

Joan-As-Police-Woman-'Chemmie'-by-Ben-Reed

Last year Ben Reed directed a superb video for The Wave Pictures Sweetheart, entirely made from of words and artwork from antiquarian books, that was nominated for Best Budget Video (Rock, Indie, Alternative) at the 2010 UK Music Video Awards.
He might be in contention again with what is effectively a companion piece, for the band's Blue Harbour. There are more cutouts in this minimalist micro-budgeter, but this time Ben's more reliant on handwritten lyrics on painted vinyl, and a record player. 
And not just any old turntable, but that must-have of the Seventies household, a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_centre" target="_blank">music centre</a>. Ben picked it up at a bootsale for a fiver...

Kris, Simon and Nic
Ben is represented

The Wave Pictures’ Blue Harbour by Ben Reed

The-Wave-Pictures’-Blue-Harbour-by-Ben-Reed

Funeral For A Friend really rock (obviously) - although they need a bit of help, on account of the fact that they're a weeny bit dead. In fact, the video within the video for Serpents in Solitude by Ben Reed is called the 'Funeral for Funeral For A Friend'.
"It's kind of a silly take on rock video cliches inspired by Weekend at Bernie's," says Ben, who's going from strength to strength. This is indeed the very definition of black humour.

Cyrus Mirza Shafa

Raw Power Management

Funeral For A Friend’s Serpents In Solitude by Ben Reed

Funeral-For-A-Friend’s-Serpents-In-Solitude-by-Ben-Reed

Fruit-based shenanigans from the resourceful Ben Reed, following up his marvellous MVA-nominated vid for The Wave Pictures' <a href="http://www.promonews.tv/2010/07/29/bug-20-the-wave-pictures%E2%80%99-sweetheart-by-ben-reed/" target="_blank">Sweetheart</a>.
Ben makes a fine job out of lipsyncing melons, etc. But you'd have thought a band as big as Mumdance could have afforded a bigger budget than this. And what happened to the 'And Sons'....

Mumdance’s Don’t Forget Me Now by Ben Reed

Mumdance’s-Don’t-Forget-Me-Now-by-Ben-Reed

A tragic-comic tale for Moshi Moshi artist James Yuill, about a hermit (played by Ioan Gwyn) who lives on his own - or rather with his family - or possibly harem - of female mannequins. 
Ben Reed, who also directed the excellent video for Race Horses' Man In My Mind, has done a fine job with the narrative and the hermit's growing paranoia, with what you would definitely call a skeleton crew - himself, DoP Nic Booth and their actor. And the girls of course.
"It was made by just the three of us over one epic weekend in May," says Ben. "It was pretty much the hottest and brightest weekend so we were all dressed in bad shorts and being chased around the house by the sun. The set dressing was just everything I own and was a nightmare as we kept losing things amongst the carnage, so we had to allocate a special drawer for valuable things like lens caps, asthma pumps, magic markers and fags."

James Yuill’s On Your Own by Ben Reed

James-Yuill’s-On-Your-Own-by-Ben-Reed

A group of stop motion animators in the 1960s making a children's TV show set in space - but it certainly isn't Oliver Postgate (we hope).

Ben Reed

Director

Videos featuring Ben Reed

2017 (1)

2016 (2)

2015 (3)

2014 (1)

2013 (1)

2012 (4)

2011 (5)

2010 (4)

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