Playlist: Savannah Setten

What’s the best promo you’ve seen recently and why?

I’m obsessed with what the video director Karim Huu Do did for The Shoes Submarine, about the minds experience of dopamine (from what I understand). It’s unsettling and disturbing but beautiful. After watching the tumultuous highs and lows of the human experience on the drug, you watch the man walk out in to his garden at night and try and touch what looks like a huge pulsing brain glowing in front of him. He turns around and sees his girlfriend standing on top of the building as if she's about to jump...wow. It’s dark but I watch that forever.

What’s the first promo you remember being impressed by?

I think it’s really awesome if someone else’s work can make you confront your own (highly personal) emotions - emotions that you might have not even realised you had. Bad Blood for Nao by Ian Pons Jewell really affected me in this way and made me confront a lot of my own emotions about a relationship I’d been in, I wrote to Ian and told him.

And what’s your all-time favourite music video?

You’ve probably had this answer a lot but Daniel Wolfe's Iron Sky. I’d love to understand more about their process filming that project. I know it was entirely street cast and that’s something I’ve really striven to do in my work ever since.

Street casting means you can get a completely different type of performance. Watching it was truly inspiring and motivating for me when as a young director. I was in an editing suite next to Daniel Wolfe at Trim recently but never got to tell him, so I’ll write it here instead :(

What other directors/artists do you look to for inspiration?

There’s an incredible Haitian-American artist Milo Matthieu’s whose huge works of art are built with layers of paint and paper and photography. If I’d read that description on paper, I wouldn't like the sound of it but go and research his work.

He makes outstandingly beautiful pieces of Frankensteinian textural art with a lot of observations around race and culture… I find his work so, so stirring.

What are you listening to at the moment?

I love a singer called Celeste, she sings over soulful, jazz instrumentals and her voice is raw and chilling. Listen to her track Lately, it will really take your mind somewhere different!

What’s your favourite bit of tech, whether for professional or personal use?

A friend of mine gave me a pair of Audio Technica production headphones that were worth something silly like a grand.

It looks like you're wearing two giant buckets on your head when you listen, and you need a suitcase to take them anywhere…. but when I first used them it was a sound of enlightenment. My beloved 5.99 John Lewis in-ears that had kept me going through the years went safely in the bin.

What artist(s) would you most like to work with and why?

if I could have made a music film for Otis Reddings Change is Gonna Come whilst he was alive, I think my career would be complete before it even started.