Appointment

“The lyrics are about an early memory and these visuals 100% capture what’s meaningful about the song… it’s archival, nostalgic and romantic.” – Matthew Mason

The ‘Appointment’ video was born from the feeling of digging through and watching old video tapes – reviewing the past with these archival artefacts that have been weathered from the sun, dust and scratches from a garage. As time goes by, these artefacts slowly decay and deteriorate as do our own memories. They jumble and blend together becoming a reel of past and present- a beautiful stream of time that’s poetic and bittersweet.

The approach for ‘Appointment’ became a way for the studio to experiment methods of degrading film while preserving the original footage. While we didn’t have the heart to tinker with the band’s own home videos, we were able to hunt down archival footage of families and their travels online. However, purchasing them in lots left us in the dark. The outcome would be determined by the quality of stranger’s own home videos. Ultimately this worked in our favour as we wanted to show spliced, fragmented memories that were cut and jumbled together, much like watching old home-made movies. We displayed some of the film we purchased on an 8mm projector with a white screen. In experimenting with the projection itself, we were able to physically record jumps and flickers of the footage on display.

Behind the scenes super8 footage of the DMA’S was recorded both by the band and Adam ‘Rudy’ Udovich. The footage intersperses views of the Sydney Opera House with the band’s rehearsals and performances, as well as holiday footage and home videos, resulting in a filmic montage which could very easily be flickers of the band’s past memories.

To add to the concept, we tapped New Zealand artist Len Lye, making use of his experiments in motion. The frenetic, playful nature of his paintings in motion gives a beautiful child-like giddiness to the viewer, a feeling we wanted to add to the music video. As the footage was edited down, we scratched frames and painted overlays, corresponding to each shot. These elements helped provide another layer to the video, the scribbles and drawings brought a youthful whimsical emotion to carry the band’s sentiment to the track.