Kris Moyes

A knack for making visually experimental music videos has catapulted Aussie director Kris Moyes on to the 'most-wanted' list. He talks to David Knight about forensics, creativie paths and passion

In late 2005 Kris Moyes' first music video was released and found its way onto the internet. "Within four hours I got two offers from the UK to be represented," he recalls. "It was almost instantaneous."

Moyes is not boasting. He's just reflecting on a pivotal moment in his career, and the speed with which things can happen: one moment this resident of Sydney was nobody special, the next he was a hot property in London.

But it was not so surprising. Moyes' video for The Presets' Are You the One? is an avalanche of visual experimentation - like channel surfing between CCTV footage, night-vision footage, lip-synching pre-natal babies and robots, and a band performance that continuously deconstructs into pixels, then regenerates. It heralded, in no uncertain terms, the arrival of a bright new directing talent.

That video for The Presets - his brother Kim's band - went on to be nominated for an ARIA (the Australian equivalent of a Grammy) for best video in 2006. Moyes has since directed more outstanding videos for other exciting artists, from Down Under and around the world. He has become, in effect, house director for hip Aussie indie label Modular Recordings. And he has won awards - including best video for his second Presets video, My People, at the 2008 ARIAs.
His stock-in-trade is an eclectic onslaught of visual imagination and wit. The style may change, shifting between animation and live action - sometimes within the same video - but it is always clever, and utterly riveting.

With the Softlightes' Heart Made of Sound he brilliantly spells out and animates every word of the lyrics with different everyday objects or material; with Wolfmother's White Unicorn, he invented a whole new delightfully subversive genre of video graffiti (more of which later).

He made Sia endure painful-looking face manipulation in Buttons; and in The Preset's My People (which was also nominated for a music video D&AD award in '08) he repeated and overlaid multiple live action images to create a mesmeric, near-abstract form of video graphic art.

Now Moyes has been working with some household names of modern indie rock: Beck and Franz Ferdinand. His Beck video for Youthless features 30-odd different representations of the singer in puppet or sculpture form, in materials including metal, Plasticine, wool, cloth, balloon and flowers. He has had a number of Sydney arts and crafts folk helping to make them. That's a departure, because he is highly resourceful, self-sufficient and hands-on in all aspects of his work. But then he has been busy lately.

"I agreed to do two videos simultaneously - something I wouldn't do normally, but these are two artists I love," he says, revealing that the Franz Ferdinand video for Ulysses "explores the darker side of psychedelic drugs". Moyes has also begun applying his talents to commercials for the first time - including an ad for Cadbury's Favourites for Melbourne-based agency GPY&R, where picnic-revellers ingeniously pop out of hampers, blankets and parasols.

But interestingly, he has yet to sign with a UK production company. There cannot be a lack of offers, surely? Moyes, who just turned 30, says: "I'm not in a rush to sign my life away."
Being without representation in London is obviously not affecting him unduly. He is, after all, with Revolver Film in Australia and The Directors Bureau in Los Angeles. Speaking by phone from Sydney, he has just completed the Beck video but is still deeply embroiled in post production on Franz Ferdinand. He comes across as principled and focused - and someone who relishes a challenge.

"I try very hard not to repeat myself, and to step out of my comfort zone," he says. "I like to go down the road least travelled. I'm not in the industry for the money."

Which is probably just as well if you direct music videos these days in Australia or anywhere else. But his determination and self-belief in overcoming adversity is striking and appears to be a running theme as he recalls various character-building experiences that led him to his current position.

"My main ambition as a kid was to be a forensic pathologist," he reveals. "I was always curious about how things work." Remarkably, he managed to persuade the relevant authorities to let him do work experience in a police pathology lab when he was just 15 years old. With predictable results.

"I had access to all the fucked-up cases. I thought it would be amazing, but it was fucking traumatic! I decided 'I think I'll find another way. I'm going to be an artist'."
But growing up on the northern beaches in Sydney - a stronghold of surfer dudes not renowned for their liberal attitudes - was tough. "My brother and I were creative types in an area full of muscular men who were homophobic [Moyes' brother Kim is gay], and we used to be chased by these fuckwits all the time. But we didn't really let that shit affect us."

Then when Moyes arrived at Sydney's TAFE university to study Fine Art, he immediately broke his drawing arm. Rather than quitting, he taught himself to draw left-handed, and tap into "the hemisphere of my brain that I hadn't used before." He ended up with two distinct drawing styles for left and right hands. "It definitely had a contributing effect on the way I look at things."

Moving to the University of New South Wales' College of Fine Arts, he started making films with fellow students. "We thought: why show work in galleries when you can show it in cinemas?" he says. That led him to work on an animated short film directed by a friend who was studying at the prestigious Australian Film and TV School. At 21, Moyes found himself teaching there for a few months to students older than himself.

He left to begin freelancing as a motion graphics artist, animator and editor, working for "directors who were terrible. I felt frustrated that they were getting work and employing me." Hence his determination, when The Presets signed to Modular, to break into directing himself.
Moyes adds that he and his brother Kim "inspire each other". Although he reveals that when it came to the video for Are You The One?, Kim (older by a couple of years) goaded him by saying that other more experienced directors were also writing treatments for the video. "I was like: 'what's a treatment?'," Moyes recalls. "I wrote my outlandish ideas, while he told me about these other directors. So I gave them no excuse to turn me down."

After that success he swiftly followed up with more videos for other Modular acts. One of the first was for retro-rock outfit Wolfmother, where the band actually wanted to utilise Moyes' editing skills to make a promo from existing live performance footage of their track White Unicorn. But Moyes had other ideas.

"I didn't want to let them down, so I threw them a curveball - release it, then deface it." His inspiration was Marcel Duchamp's Dada-inspired defacement of the Mona Lisa with a moustache. So two months after the 'straight' performance video's release, a VHS tape was sent to music TV stations - a 'defaced' version, attributed to "Bandito Bruce", featuring brilliant (and occasionally profane) animated doodles added over the footage. It generated controversy and lots of discussion about a new defacement video genre.


Then his video for LA band Softlightes' Heart Made of Sound garnered further attention - and tested his principles. "Fallon offered me 10 ads based on that idea," he says. "But that conflicted with my creative choices."

Indeed, this patently talented director seems comfortable to continue to work within the parameters of low-budget promos. But then he has never known anything else in terms of videos. With his clip for Sia's Buttons, he explains that he was staying at the singer's house in Los Angeles, but writing a treatment for The Gossip, developing his face manipulation idea for their lead singer Beth Ditto.

"Sia said: 'If they don't do it, I want to do it.' That's what happened. We made it super-fast on my shit mini-DV camera. It was no-frills filmmaking, and testament to the strength of ideas. You don't really need a big budget."

He explains that he has just three criteria in deciding whether or not to make a video: "'Are they nice people? Do I like their music? Is there enough money?' If it's two out of three, then I'm doing well.."

When it comes to commercials, he says: "Like everything, if I'm inspired and my ideas are liked, then I'll do it. I'm going to have to take it as it comes." And in the case of his Cadbury commercial, he adds: "I just saw the potential for a creative situation to unfold and all my ideas were loved."

But ads will have to continue to compete for his attention while clients such as Franz Ferdinand are beating a path to his door. His video for their long-awaited new single promises great things, featuring a series of 'bad trip' psychedelic micro-stories based the band's own experiences and hand-painted 35mm film in the style of Stan Brakhage. Oh, and there's a totem pole.

"I made a decision that I wasn't going to show my work in the context of a gallery. I feel I'm reaching a far greater audience, creating work in a field that's much more dynamic and people are responding to it." And not only the punters watching music TV or YouTube, it seems.

"I got a call from the Goethe Institute recently," he reveals. "And that's
really why I'm making videos - so that a cultural body such as the Goethe Institute sees it as art."

David Knight is the editor of promonews.tv