Bullion's Davis Silis Directs Mesmerising New Video for Jones' 'Melt'

In his second video for Jones, Bullion director Davis Silis captures the Jones' mesmerising performance of Melt by employing a distinctive split-image technique allied with a constantly rotating camera move. 

With the resources that were available to make it, not surprisingly this posed a huge technical challenge, as Davis explain: "There’s a line in the lyrics – 'We started with nothing, grew into something' – that got me thinking about the way relationships change who we are over time. How that experience has an impact on you, and the way you influence someone as much as they influence you. That was the visual metaphor of the video; to begin with Cherie [Jones] as she was, and then create a new version of her. Fragment by fragment. Experience by experience.

"The idea was to shoot single long takes of her performance multiple times on just two lenses, so we could add fragments from different takes and the camera would always be in the same position. Our choreographer, Alexandra Green, also created movement that would progressively change over takes, so when we spliced one shot with another, we’d get beautiful layers of movement.

"Motion control wasn’t an option, so the technique came down to old-school human ingenuity by James Rhodes and his ace camera team."

"The obvious way to pull this off was motion control, but that wasn’t an option. So the technique came down to some old-school human ingenuity by James Rhodes and his ace camera team. After the 360º track was laid, they translated each snare hit in the song to marks on the floor, which would be hit by a laser attached to a dolly operated by our grip Rogan, who happened to also be a drummer with an impeccable sense of rhythm.

"Then to separate Cherie from the background, we used a second dolly with a moving green screen, the same laser-guided technique and a second grip, which let us keep both dollies perfectly 180º apart and moving at the same speed, since we didn’t have time to rig or light the entire space in green. The effect was to create a completely natural image, as though it were all in-camera.

"And that was important. To create a video that didn’t feel at all technical, even though it was.”