Duncan Catteral // Cinematographer

What I love about making music videos is there’s something completely different every time – whether it’s the people you’re working with, the music you’re working with or the style of cinematography I might use. I used to work on independent films, and these would take forever to see a final version - sometimes over a year. With music videos there’s only weeks between filming and releasing. I think this ultimately gives you a greater chance to review and refine your work, which can only make you a better filmmaker. I have been described as a perfectionist, but one that can get the job finished. I think a certain amount of synaesthesia is involved too.

I started out my path in filmmaking with stopmotion animation as a teenage, at one point making a Christmas film with all my family members as green plasticine aliens. My first production with actors was a rather elaborate affair. At seventeen I made German Expressionist styled silent film called ‘Lacrouso and Nhjia’ which featured an insane set which had walls that sloped inwards and out.

When I got to university, at Canterbury Christ Church University, I realised that with the coming of YouTube it would be very hard to make an impact with a short film as they had reached saturation point online. I decided to make a feature film, and at nineteen, between my first and second year of university I shot a production called ‘The Shrine’. I generally look back on the film with mixed feelings. The problems is, for all the kudos of making something of that scale at that age, it’s was made with a reasonably untrained skill set and the casting was a strange mix of professional actors and non professionals. It did however allow me to develop characters for longer and experiment with some radical directing techniques influenced by Antonin Artaud.

The final year of university saw a rekindling of my stopmotion animation skills with ‘The Phantom Lorenz’. Although the film was ultimately only six and a half minutes long, I spent amount six months making it, largely due to its epic scale which required new sets to be build almost every three shots. Imagine making Metropolis in a student bedroom, and you get the picture.

After university I set up Clockwork Amoeba. I think I spent the first year or finding the best crew and collaborators to work with. I met some lovely people, I met some crazy people. Whilst crewing on a feature called ‘Love Story’ I found quite a few of the crew members who I’d consider to be the people I could work with best. Although I shoot quite a lot of my projects solo, these guys do make appearances when budgets allow and are indispensible.  I’ve been very lucky to have been mentored by a retired lighting cameraman and former studio owner, Neil Faith. I think the knowledge he’s shared with me has had a profound effect on my craft, allowing me to continue to make 16mm projects in a non-academic setup and to light some of my best work.

At the start of 2010 I made a business decision to focus purely on music videos. I’d struggled with confidence in my own work for a while but with music videos there was body of work I had become very proud of. Over the course of the year I worked on countless projects and have become very well networked across a number of different cities, notably Liverpool and London. I love working on music videos and I’m very happy to work with creative people who come to the table with their own ideas, as is the case with the many talented musicians I meet.