Director of Photography

Ivan Abel

This visually arresting and beautifully designed video for Triangle Records artist Serpent With Feet is the first by the new directing team Crudo, comprised of two very experienced creatives:&nbsp;photographer and director Timothy Saccenti, and Alvin Cruz, CD at Method VFX studio.Saccenti and Cruz&nbsp;employ their well-matched talents to present&nbsp;the highly expressive Josiah Wise (aka Serpent With Feet), in a dark, magical place. Wise trails colour and light, is silhouetted in clouds of smoke, abstracted in glass - its appropriately experimental and epic imagery of his avant garde update of classic gospel music.

United States

Crudo

Garen Barsegian

Whooden/holographic Thorns

Nate Spengler

Michael Yetter

Andrea Huelse

Edda Gudmundsdottir

Laura Stiassni

Matt Posey

PS260

Sofie Borup

Company 3

Method Studios

Anna Kravtsov

Jennifer Heath

Triangle Records

Serpent With Feet 'Four Ethers' by Crudo 

Serpent-With-Feet-'Four-Ethers'-by-Crudo-[timothy-Saccenti-+-Alvin-Cruz]

Timothy Saccenti brings to the table a 7 minute visual and conceptual behemoth with Big Black Coat by The Junior Boys. A trippy assault on the senses that purposefully treads the line between the eye-bleedingly weird&nbsp;and the beautiful.

Timothy Saccenti

HolographicThorns

City Slang

Steven Graf

Kurt Beers

Caroline Celis

Radical Media

Hey Mister!

Russell Mack

Kevin Stein

Maurice Caicedo

The Junior Boys 'Big Black Coat' by Timothy Saccenti

The Junior Boys "Big Black Coat"

Following his promo for <a href="http://www.promonews.tv/videos/2013/05/03/naughty-boy-‘la-la-la’-ft-sam-smith-ian-pons-jewell" target="_blank">La La La</a>, Ian Pons Jewell teams up with Naughty Boy once again, delivering a sad and sweet doggy tale in his video for Home featuring Sam Romans.Shot from the POV of the dog, we see&nbsp;the dog at the photographer&#39;s studio,&nbsp;out on the city streets, at a karaoke bar, down the park... before he tries to get back home to his owner.

United Kingdom

Ian Pons Jewell

Marieta Blaskova

Residency

Gaetan Rousseau

Nerenda Eid

Brien Justiniano

Franklin Burger

Wayne Mcelroy

Kate Stein

Demetrios Stavracos

Gaia Borretti

Benjamin Di Giacomo

Virgin EMI

James Hackett

Naughty Boy Ft. Sam Romans 'Home' by Ian Pons Jewell

Naughty-Boy-Ft.-Sam-Romans-'Home'-by-Ian-Pons-Jewell

Tim Saccenti has been making inventive, visually stunning performance videos ever since his classic for&nbsp;Battles&#39; Atlas in 2007. He&#39;s been working with projections for a while too, and it&#39;s all come together with his video for new pop-electronic duo Phantogram&#39;s Fall In Love - co-directed with&nbsp;Joshua &#39;Praystation&#39;&nbsp;Davis, a visual code artist he&#39;s been collaborating with for a while.The result is mesmerizing, the impact heightened the fact the video was shot in true black and white, on the Red Monochrome.&nbsp;

Brooke McDaniel

Joshua Davis

Sub Rosa

Rex Lowry

Mark Holmes

Republic Records

Phantogram 'Fall In Love' by Timothy Saccenti

A collaboration between Natasha Khan and animation/mixed media master Peter Sluszka has resulted in this diverse and absorbing visual feast for Bat For Lashes' Lilies - the fourth single from the critically acclaimed album The Haunted Man: life-sized puppets, a flock of 2D spirits, miniature landscapes, morphing polygons, and Natasha herself were animated to create a universe in constant flux.
It's Peter Sluszka's first music video since his animation tour de force for <a href="http://www.promonews.tv/2012/05/16/moones-better-energy-by-peter-sluszka/" target="_blank">Moones' Better Energy</a> last year, and this repeats the trick of bombarding the viewer with delightful creations - Natasha's song unleashes a trio of curious puppets, a wax and paper ocean, a cloud contraption and a series of stop motion sequences, including Natasha's head becoming encased in a glass case. 
And it took months to come together, from Natasha and Peter's first meeting in New York last year, to a three day shoot in Hornet Inc's studio later in the year, to the completion of the stop motion work in early 2013. 
"Natasha and I developed the idea together, starting with a meeting in New York when she was here last May for her album cover shoot," explains Peter. "She shared the track, as well as initial ideas and inspirations. This was very helpful as it gave me a starting point and insight into the types of visuals she was interested in. After the first meeting, we emailed thoughts and references and began developing a more specific approach and design. 
"Ultimately, it took months. We shot Natasha's live performance and animation sequences in three intense days in the fall and then slowly accumulated the remaining animation shots. Encasing Natasha in glass was in fact one of the hardest sequences. It required her to pose very uncomfortably for hours and it was claustrophobic despite the transparency. The entire structure was held together with copper foil tape that I had to slice away incrementally with an x-acto knife. Between the blade proximity to Natasha's head and the need to shoot efficiently, it was one of the more stressful animation processes I can remember.
"I had a blast working with Natasha and I think the performance footage with the massive puppets shows moments of real joy, humor, and improvisation that counterbalance the poise and meticulousness of the animation shots. It was also a pleasure working with a great and devoted crew. Like so many videos, the budget was tight relative to the creative ambitions and production designer Ben Phelan pulled together some incredibly inventive builds with very limited resources. From the start, everyone credited in this production went above and beyond to make it as unique as possible."

Peter Sluszka

Hornet Inc.

Michael Feder

Anita Chao

Rommel Genciana

Casey Wooden

Ben Phelan

Laura Wass

Bat For Lashes 'Lilies' by Peter Sluszka

Bat-For-Lashes-'Lilies'-by-Peter-Sluszka

Depeche Mode are back, with a surprise: Heaven, first single from forthcoming album Delta Machine, is a mighty pop tune, and Timothy Saccenti's video is a straight-ahead performance video of the band, shot appropriately enough in an abandoned church in New Orleans, embellished with live projections and imagery that touch upon a voodoo theme. 
The video followed the band's collaboration with Tim on another project towards the end of last year - <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watchv=NihMVuspKQw" target="_blank">effectively a teaser for the new album</a>. "Depeche Mode approached me to direct the video Heaven" as a continuation of the campaign we began with our studio film for their track Angel," Tim explains. "The album is a mix of blues and electronics, and that was my starting point for the concept. This was to be the band's first proper performance video in ages so the location was very important." 
Tim reveals that the band felt that voodoo was at the root of the songs on the album, where "blues meet Kraftwerk" - hence the album being called Delta Machine. "In order to delve into the voodoo vibe we travelled to New Orleans to soak it up and find a suitable locale... it in the end being a beautiful abandoned church," he says. 
"After studying various variations on the Heaven theme, I came up with a concept that mixed a symbolic story with hints of voodoo and imagery, keeping in mind the band's rich visual history, but updating it with my own twist."

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=Fy7FzXLin7o

Jennifer He

Jason Baum

Dayn Williams

Sherri Korhonen, Andrea Huelse

Andrea Helgadottir

Saul Levitz

Depeche Mode 'Heaven' by Timothy Saccenti

Depeche-Mode-'Heaven'-by-Timothy-Saccenti

Tim Saccenti's video for Yeasayer's Longevity is a straightforward performance video with a difference. It appears to last nearly a lifetime...
Yeasayer lay down Longevity in their recording studio with Tim cameoing as their producer himself. But singer Chris Keating undergoes a remarkable transformation during the performance, thanks to a beautifully calibrated mixture of in-camera and post effects work.
"It's actually a combo of makeup, prosthetics, a real skull, a 3D skull, an amazing tracking an post team and a ton of flame," Tim explains. "We were trying to keep it as practical as possible, nearly comedic in a way, which is much harder than you'd think!"

Stephanie Barkley

Ryan Mckenna

Yeasayer 'Longevity' by Timothy Saccenti

Yeasayer-'Longevity'-by-Timothy-Saccenti

Drugs, guns, sex, hip hop, more drugs, more of everything - and degenerate puppet squirrels... it's Tim Saccenti's marvellous video for El-P's The Full Retard - an utterly scurrilous mix of early Beastie Boys, Fear &amp; Loathing in Las Vegas, Scarface and The Muppets. 
We've had badly behaved puppets before, but this little squirrel punk, in league with good buddy El-P, takes some beating. Arguably the best/most outrageous bit is when he shoots the angelic kid preaching peace and love, but it's a close run thing...

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=OZptOs8Gu9k&amp;feature=youtu.be

Lauren Sieczkowski

Starworks Group

Peter Mayer

Stewart Gerard

Rob Meyers

James Wojtal

El-P 'The Full Retard' by Timothy Saccenti (NSFW)

El-P-'The-Full-Retard'-by-Timothy-Saccenti-(NSFW)

A band from Hertfordsire called Moones burst upon us with the amazing video for Better Energy, a combination of stop motion, claymation, pixelation, puppetry and much more - all orchestrated by master animator Peter Sluszka. 
It features the band as sailors stranded on an iceberg, trying to make fire, play music, and SOS for help, while a sea monster devours their ship, the captain bursts into flames, and the ship's cat gets handy with a shotgun.
This was co-written by Peter Sluszka - who's work includes animation directing Michel Gondry videos like Bjork's Crystalline - and band founder Ollie Kristian, and the band spent a weekend at the Hornet Inc workshop in New York suffering for their considerable art to create many of the stopframe sequences (and have their fingers getting chopped off, be electrocuted, etc) before returning to London to shoot the rest. Then it took two months at Hornet to complete the animation and compositing.

Joel Kretschman &amp; C

Marcos Herrera, N

Josh Tyron

Aaron Smith, Alexa Harris

Anthony Henderson

Alan Gordon

Moones 'Better Energy' by Peter Sluszka

Moones-'Better-Energy'-by-Peter-Sluszka

Top model Coco Young stars in the 'girl on a motorbike' video for Washed Out's Eyes Be Closed by Tim Saccenti and Alan Bibby. 
Minimal, mesmeric and, of course, gorgeous. Luckily Coco's forgotten her helmet... 

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=Cj2HcdiOmt8

Brian Graf

Coco Young

Andrew Borin @ Stardust

Partizan Darkroom

Alan Bib

Washed Out 'Eyes Be Closed' by Timothy Saccenti and Alan Bibby

Washed-Out-'Eyes-Be-Closed'-by-Timothy-Saccenti-and-Alan-Bibby

Supreme imagemaker Tim Saccenti plays with light and creates a sumptuous performance video to herald Blonde Redhead's new album Penny Sparkle - and new musical direction.
Best enjoyed at the highest possible resolution, big image and a nice clean screen...


Tim Saccenti on making the video for Blonde Redhead's Not Getting There
"I worked with Kazu, the singer of the band and creative force, on the initial concepts. The band had a very new direction sonically, ditching their art-rock guitar roots and bringing in a synthetic, shadowy palette. Responding to this my initial treatment was based on an atmosphere of projections and holograms, something I wanted to experiment with myself. Using projections would also allow us variations and augmentations that would work within our limited resources and tight timeline as well as suit the music. Kazu and I both share a love of video installation art and this was the basis of our approach. The equestrian theme has been important to her so that was incorporated within our loose narrative and symbolism as well. 
"Working within these parameters our team designed a lighting setup and graphics that would create a sense of volume in space when projected. This is quite different than creating visuals that are meant to be projected onto a flat surface and very difficult to judge beforehand. Without the budget for a lighting test we used pre-visualization software to estimate what we were getting, but we had very little idea what would actually happen when we turned the projectors on on the shoot day. 
"One of the difficult parts was controlling the density of the haze in the studio, which was created using 3 different machines at various densities, aided by controlling the temperature/humidity of the room. This caused havoc with our multiple 20,000 lumen projectors which would constantly overheat. Even with 20,000 lumens the film needed to be shot with an f 1.2 masterprime all the way open the entire time to get a decent exposure. 
"We had all the graphics running through laptops controlled by Ivan Safrin, who was adjusting them live by coding in the "Processing" software. This allowed us re-shape and re-design the lighting, based on the haze, camera angles, etc. Kazu felt we should keep the "primal" aspect of the track visually and we did so by making the graphics simple and organic, referencing early African art and communication. This stretched to even keeping our 3d elements as wireframes, which were shot in-camera using a "holographic" screen.
"Post shoot, Mark Szumski, vfx artist, used a technique he developed during our Flying Lotus film to track and re-project some of the visual elements onto the subjects in Flame and enhance the look overall. Since the color palette was very simple any push in the wrong direction in the telecine looked extreme, and the fluctuating color temperature and chromatic aberration of the project bulbs and lenses would mean similar takes were often wildly different tones. Colourist Damien Van Der Cruyssen at the Mill New York brought out the muted, womb-like feel we wanted. Working on a Baselight over the course of 6 hours he matched the highlights in the dark scenes to the shadows in the light scenes and brought out a sublime tonality to the final piece."

Michael Wadsworth

Blonde Redhead’s Not Getting There by Timothy Saccenti

Blonde-Redhead’s-Not-Getting-There-by-Timothy-Saccenti

One big song from The Big Pink gets a sumptuous treatment from Tim Saccenti, who appears to have taken the naked girls from the band's cover artwork, rebuilt them in ice - and then blown them to bits, sensibly capturing the action at 1000fps. Take that, ice maidens!
Tim has been busy, as ever. His first solo art show, <a href="http://www.partizan.com/partizan/thedarkroom/garden_of_unearthly_delights___d">The Garden of Unearthly Delights</a>, just opened at the Diesel Gallery in Tokyo. And his <a href="http://www.partizan.com/partizan/thedarkroom/ps3__the_playface">Playface</a> commercials for the pan-Asia launch of the new PS3 console have just landed - a brilliantly orchestrated fusion of gameplay faces and sound design.

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=OGnNlQ-KNv4&amp;feature=related[/youtube]
Timothy Saccenti on making the video for The Big Pink's Dominos
"The track has mountains of ambience to it, it's quite bombastic, so I felt having a considerable amount of atmosphere would be appropriate, in this case snow, ice, fog, flares and coloured gels. Oh, and slow-motion... Yes it's definitely a music video. In addition this, being a new band, was meant to introduce them as a live presence, so it needed to be a performance video in some aspect.
"Once we designed the lighting, which was quite flarey with lights pointed directly into the camera - light stands were removed in post by Mark Szumski, flame artist - Mark Holmes, the stylist, picked out some amazing outfits that worked really well, texture wise, with the side and back lighting as well as colour.
"I also had the idea that, to match the tracks bombast, we should blow something up. Not having worked with pyro before, it was an intense learning experience. The track being about relationships and their ice and fire emotions, I thought that ice sculptures of beautiful women would be a poetic take and work well visually.
"During pre-pro Caroline Celis, who art directs many of our projects, helped choose poses for the ice sculptures, and she did on-set decorating - including hand painting the drum kit - to match the feel of the piece. The sculptures melted quickly under the lighting we had but became more and beautiful as they did, looking at times like 3D renderings of Henry Moore sculptures.
"During the course of the shoot we found different ways to exploding them, placing detonators at particular places [neck, back, crotch] for different effects - my favourite being the neck-explosion-head-tumble sequence. An interesting phenomena was that, even at 1000fps, there was only one frame between when the sculpture was clear and glassy to when it turned pure white from the detonation and began shattering. It looked like a jump cut.
"Performance-wise Ivan shot with a masterzoom on the red camera which allowed for some lovely depth of field and to get much coverage without having to move the dolly very often, which saved us an enormous amount of time. It was a very challenging shoot - ice, explosions, snow, on a tight budget and tighter timeline - but our producer Brian Graf did a fantastic job pulling it all together."

Jeff Sheperd

Mark Szumski

Damien Van Der Cruyssen

Jason White

The Big Pink’s Dominos by Timothy Saccenti

The-Big-Pink’s-Dominos-by-Timothy-Saccenti

It's an indie type of pop vid, to be sure, for Chairlift's Bruises. But a lovely song, with a rather gorgeous singer, gets a sensual, très sexy treatment.
"It's not got any weird tricks or WTF moments, which is a first for me," says Tim. Perhaps not - but Bruises is still a big pleasure.

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=tFuYmMVtcLA[/youtube]

Michelle Ziff

Meghan Folsom and Chelsea Gombes

Sara Greene

Chairlift’s Bruises by Timothy Saccenti

Chairlift’s-Bruises-by-Timothy-Saccenti

Men in white suits are all the rage. There's the bouncing man in Dougal Wilson's Goldfrapp Happiness video, and Sebastien Tellier (and his body doubles) in Ace Norton's video for Eurovision entry Divine.
And then there's Jamie Lidell, the soul man who brings solace to girls who speak, hear and see no evil in Tim Saccenti's video for Another Day.
"Having seen Jamie perform live on numerous occasions I was surprised that in his previous videos his compelling strengths as a performer, interacting with people, projecting his energy, had never come across," says Tim. "Knowing this we designed the ideas of the video to embrace and showcase these strengths as well as tell the story the track."
After his videos for Battles and Animal Collective last year, this simply confirms that Tim, already with a huge reputation for his photography, weaves similar magic with the moving image and is destined for greatness.

Shot in absolutely freezing conditions last winter in Brooklyn, Tim says, "It was very challenging and everyone was working around the clock to make it happen, and on a modest budget. The choreographer, Vangeline, did an amazing job of working out all of the work with the dancers under a huge amount of stress, and Jeff Shepard, our production designer made the lightboxes in that time.
"The stylist Alice Bertay performed miracles by putting together outfits that should have been way out of our budget and the post effects team at Click 3X were miracle workers in post."

Ivan Abel

Director of Photography

Videos featuring Ivan Abel

2016 (2)

2014 (2)

2013 (2)

2012 (3)

2011 (1)

2010 (1)

2009 (2)

2008 (1)

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