Washington Square Films director Mark Pellington captures the memory of waiting, and the meditation therein, in ruminative hypnotic journey “Just Wait,” which he helmed and produced.
The short film pairs hooded and masked travelers scattered across abandoned city streets and moonlit ocean surf–often weighed down and wound up by an unseen force–with spoken meditations by author Peter Caws.
Featuring Matthew Caws, the film is an intimate yet abstract allegory—a beautiful exploration of human immersion into landscapes both man-made and natural.
Shot by night, the cinematic imagery twists and turns, playing with optical effects like mirroring to emphasize the warp of today’s present-day reality.
“I have been a huge fan and committed devotee of the band Nada Surf for many years. As a creator of videos and films, I love the marriage of imagery and music, and in recent years have really been pushing the narrative boundaries and form of pop/rock videos into music films from artists like Imagine Dragons to Low, Chelsea Wolfe to Damien Marley,” Pellington tells Reel 360.
The song Just Wait joins the abstract examination, calling for the travelers to ‘just wait’ and carry optimism through hardship and adversity, when the approach is all that’s left to do.
ALSO READ: A virtual universe unfolds in Fitz’s Head Up High video
Pellington adds, “I love to merge my mind with the soul and music of brave artists like Nada Surf, open to new forms of visualizing their music, and collectively come up with work, which expands the limitation of both music video and pop song into something deeper— structurally, sonically and conceptually.
“Matthew Caws and I connected , and we decided to collaborate together on this music film , a labor of love inspired by his late father’s Peter Caws‘ profound meditations. The piece actually benefited from the coronavirus as we really took our time, let ideas percolate, and did not feel a need to rush and make a product. Matthew is a very generous artist and let me interpret pretty freely. We really connected to the themes of the piece, and I was magnifIcently inspired by his relationship to his late father, the words he created and they shared. This meditative philosophical fabric served as the character’s fuel in the film.
“We gathered imagery and filmed globally in 3 cities—Cambridge (UK), Los Angeles and Sydney. The construction and gathering of images was very free-form, unscripted and completely motivated by the music. The loose idea of a silver clad faceless ‘traveller’ moving through these lights and image landscapes was conceived as a narrative through line, and this constant imagistic metaphor was captured in all 3 countries.”
CREDITS:
- Spoken Meditations: Peter Caws
- Voices: Peter Caws, from The Book of Hylas (Barsuk) by Peter Caws and Parkington Sisters; Matthew Caws, from Meditations 1973-77 (Unpublished) by Peter Caws
- Producer/Director: Mark Pellington
- Editing/VFX: Sergio Pinheiro
- DOP (LA): Austin Ahlborg
- DOP (Cambridge): Anne Evelin Lawford
- DOP (Sydney): Jimmy Daniel
- The Travelers (Cast): Courtney Scarr, Matthew Caws
- UK Production: Peter Fraser
- US Crew: George Ellett (AC), Virginia Pellington, Case Avron, Ben Pellington
- Collage Image FX: Sweeten
- Digital Colorist: Jill Bogdanowicz
- Sound Design: Louie Lino, Sergio Pinheiro
- Nada Surf: Matthew Caws, Daniel Lorca, Ira Elliot, Louie Lino
- Strings: Phillip Peterson
- Produced By: Ian Laughton (Nada Surf)
- Recording and Additional Production: Nick Brine (Rockfield Studios)
- Additional Recording: Tom Beaujor (Kaleidoscope Sound)
- Peter Caws Recorded By: William Flynn (One Thousand Birds)
- Mix: John Goodmason (Bog Roll)
- Master: Geoff Pesche (Abbey Road)
- “Just Wait” Written By: Matthew Caws, Gavin Slate, Daniel Lorca, Ira Elliot, Louie Lino (Tunes of Jupiter, BMI/Ole Green Vinyl Music, Socan Karmacode, ASCAP/Signal Corps, BMI)
- From the Album: Never Not Together (Barsuk/City Slang)
SOURCE: Press Kitchen
