Vancouver director Mike Southworth is up for three out of five nominations for the best music video category at the 2014 Western Canadian Music Awards.
The three videos are all for popular Vancouver artists: former Shuswap resident Dominique Fricot – Our Last Song, Hilary Grift – Waltzing Matilda and The Harpoonist & the Axe Murderer – Shake It.
“It’s just really nice that people are appreciating them, it’s a lot of work not for a lot of money,” Southworth laughs. “I would have been happy with one nomination – to get three is amazing.”
The content of the videos is about as drastically different as three videos could be, he says. Our Last Song is stop-motion time-lapse with more than 3,000 pictures and 850 costume changes from artist Dominique Fricot; Shake It is set in a rundown trailer park with a hilarious cast of characters and Waltzing Matilda is a short film based in the comedic film noir style of the 1950s and featuring an invisible detective, a mad scientist and a femme fatale.
Southworth is also a music producer who has produced more than 100 albums for artists like Grift, Warren Dean Flandez and C.R. Avery. His initial foray into music videos was making videos for his own band, Scatterheart.
“We needed videos but didn’t have a lot of money so we decided to make them on our own,” he says. “These first low-budget videos, like the all-in-one-shot Beautiful, were so unique and creative that they made it onto a handful of top-10 press lists, received tens of thousands of views online and were nominated for WCMA awards.”
It wasn’t long before Southworth was being approached to make music videos for other artists.
“I already had a lot of connections in the music industry so it all just fell into place,” he says. “It’s nice not to have to pound the pavement and I’ve found if you do good work, people come to you for the most part.”
Just four years later, Southworth and his company, Collide Entertainment, have produced more than 50 music videos.
“I really love the form of music videos,” he says. “You can try out a lot of different looks and techniques in a short timeline.”
Southworth says videos also provide an opportunity to take the concept of the song and build something bigger around it.
Sharing the three nominations is Vancouver cinematographer Byron Kopman, who helped create the distinctive and polished look of these videos.
Southworth and Kopman have worked together on more than 20 projects since their first video together for Fricot’s Our Last Song in fall 2012.
Southworth just finished his first commercial for Chevy US and is working on scripts for two short films.
Amid his many commitments, Southworth makes time to feed his musical soul by playing with his own band.
He, his wife Hilary Grift, and Dominique Fricot will launch a month-long tour across Vancouver Island and as far east as Saskatchewan. They will appear at the Shuswap Pie Company on July 17.
