November has been a huge month for Photoplay director, James Chappell. He achieved an Australian Directors’ Guild Awards nomination for Best Director in Commercial Content, for his huge budget promo, The Voice, with Channel 7, and he made the music video, for Neil Gaiman’s Bloody Sunrise – in a graveyard, both of which were both personal goals.
Chappell has won two ARIA Awards, both for his music videos with Guy Sebastian, but this was his first ADG Awards commercial nomination. And working with Neil Gaiman was a wonderful gift. “What sold me in was Neil Gaiman’s name. I love his work and my partner is obsessed with him also – American Gods; the Sandman series on Netflix, just renewed for Season two; Coraline, the gothic kids’ movie; and the chance to do something with vampire and graveyards. I’ve been into all that since I was a kid,” Chappell noted.” I hesitated for a few weeks because it was bit of a love job in terms of budget, but I was able to piggyback the shoot off a big commercial I was doing the day before, keep it streamlined and put all the money on screen.” Chappell produced the video with co-producer, Adil Jain.
Moreover, Chappell’s original idea was translated exactly into the music video. Gaiman loved it. Chappell recounted, “Shortly after I sent my idea to Gaiman he replied, ‘I think it is marvellous. Really funny. What a treat’. To have that endorsement and approval from him was incredible. What a shot of confidence for what I was undertaking.”
Gaiman released the video on Halloween, taking his millions of fans by surprise. They didn’t know he made music. Gaiman had been touring with popular Australian band, FourPlay String Quartet, the musicians behind Bloody Sunrise, matching his spoken word poetry to their music, but the English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, non-fiction, audio theatre and films, was unknown as a music artist.
Chappell’s vision resonated with Gaiman’s fans. The music video has received thousands of positive comments and likes as it was shared across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. “I’ve been wanting to shoot in a graveyard forever. I saw the song matched with a Hammer Horror ‘50s cinema feel and I saw Susan Sarandon singing Science Fiction in the Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Chappell stated. Realising Chappell’s vision wasn’t without challenge. Making the video work tested Chappell’s flexibility and experience. “The day before the shoot was a beautiful sunny day. The day we shot there was this apocalyptic threat of rain and wind. The original idea was to have a low-lying fog to underline the heightened camp, horror aesthetic I was after. The wind just blew the fog very fast into the background. But because we were shooting in slo-mo it still worked. Everything felt alive in the scene with leaves and trees moving. If we hadn’t had wind, it probably would have felt more like a set, which was what I was going for, but you’ve just got to roll with what you’ve got.
“We still feel as though we were given a miracle because of the crazy weather Sydney has been having,” Chappell added. “It rained lightly for about ten minutes, which added to the load. When you’re shooting until 3am it’s quite stressful when you know you’ve got to get everything in the can, but you’ve also got the threat of something that might ruin that. There was no money to come back for a wet weather day and the band was only available for that one day.”
Chappell also took a punt that Gaiman’s audience would appreciate an untraditional un-happy ending. His heroine, a lonely vampire looking for love, doesn’t win. In fact, after her romantic approaches are rebuffed, she decides to meet the sunrise and disintegrate. “The main actress, Talia Benatar, was incredible – exactly what I was after. A vampire who was cute and endearing. Talia played all the different emotions seamlessly. I think that’s why people fell in love with her and why viewers gave such heartfelt responses when she doesn’t win in the end. It was her success that she was lovable.”
That’s not to downplay the quality of the production, a credit to Chappell’s ability to give a tiny budget a big film look. “This video was made possible by friends going above and beyond,” Chappell noted. “Christian Heinrich is one, a genius VFX artist and friend I work with. We filmed the coffin in the shadow of the church during the day. If you see the raw footage, it looks terrible, hilarious. Talia is actually standing up, not lying down, propped up on sandbags. I said to Christian that I’d like some grass or some sort of idea of dirt. He went all out got, 3D scans of dirt and made this tunnel projection. It looks like you are literally travelling down into the earth. That blew my mind. I had told him I want a gothic Wes Anderson feel and he nailed it.”
Chappell’s gothic horror video was the second a Photoplay/Playtime director produced this month. “Michael Gupta did a vampire video exactly opposite in style to mine. Also low budget but more naturalistic, where mine was pure campy horror. Ironically, the two came out together and were promoted by Photoplay at the same time. In the five years I’ve been with them, I can see that Photoplay loves to support its artists in their pure creative endeavours like music videos. Artists have to make art.”
It has been a huge month for Photoplay as well. Stef Smith has also received an Australian Directors’ Guild Awards nomination for Best Direction in Commercial Content, Best Direction in an Interactive or Immersive Project, and Best Direction in an Online Series Episode. And Jasmin Tarasin has been nominated for Best Direction in Commercial Content.
