Stuart Page on making videos

Stuart Page comments on videos he has directed or he has been involved with.

‘You Forget’ – David Kilgour (1991, HD version 2021)

A friend, Keith Kahi, had a business called Supercar, importing muscle cars from the US. He figured you could get around licencing taxes by taking the engines out, sending them in one container, and the bodies in another. So it was just parts, and then you put them back together. He had an incredible car – he told me it was an eight-litre V8 – and we hired it for $200 for a day. We proceeded to film David [Kilgour], to much enjoyment. The opening shot with the palm trees was taken at Ellerslie Racecourse. Then the shot of David going over Grafton Bridge and under the trees at Logan Campbell Park. I can’t believe we shot it in one day. We caught the ferry over to Rangitoto Island, and walked to the summit with all the camera gear.

It won an award for the music video that showed the most water – it included the entire Hauraki Gulf. We also did some time-lapse filming on the ferry. Someone said, “Contact Converse and they’ll give you some shoes.” So we got a pair of yellow, green, and blue, which David took on and off during the time lapse. Back in town we hooned out to Muriwai, where we did the last shot at sunset. I used a 300mm lens, which was awesome. We did a shoot on another day at Karekare – I asked David if he could sing underwater. “I’ll give it a go.” A guy had built his own Bolex underwater camera housing, it was incredible. I was also experimenting with filming several times through colour separation filters, so you’d end up with rainbow colours. We’d shoot time lapse, three times, getting psychedelic colours. I got him to lie down, with water spilling on to him. All very experiemental.

‘No No No’ – David Kilgour (1994)

I was working on the idea of David being this kind of celebrity. So Martin Phillipps was driving them around in his Rover, as a chauffeur. And then David had these two friends of mine, Peter Elliott, a hardcore punk from Christchurch, and Sharon Billesdon, who was in the group Snort, were his minders. There’s a whole lot of people at a party, that were central to the scene – Stephen Kilroy, Hamish Kilgour, Christine Voice – a bunch of people who were just part of that scene. I was trying to capture an Andy Warhol/Factory vibe. So Peter Elliott is filmed with a Bolex camera, like the one I was filming on, as a Warhol-like character. David played a gig at the Powerstation, and I hired a couple of big HMI lights. After the gig, we announced we were going to film the band playing the song to a CD playback, we switched on these big-ass lights, and filmed them on stage. Chris Knox was saying “You fuckin’ wankers, this is a terrible idea …” It came out really good. We filmed a few other scenes. At the time I was friendly with a Tongan woman, I hired her boyfriend and his mates to be security guards. We filmed at Auckland Airport, with these guys trying to push the cameras away.

‘Killer Clown’ – Superette (1995)

That’s a beauty. I was living on Sackville Street in Grey Lynn, with a big room. I moved my flatmate out for the day to shoot this video, which showed adults behaving like kids at a party. I have to say that the general idea for the video came from one of my close friends who also lived at the flat, Mike Sheils. Because the title ‘Killer Clown’ was about John Wayne Gacy – the serial killer – we thought we should have a kids’ party, at which adults behaved like kids. All involved were friends of the band – Ant Timpson, Kirsten Smith, Simon Cuming (aka S.c. Cumuna). He was the star of the three Superette videos I did. He’s the little guy who has a sugar OD, you see him getting bullied by the girl on roller skates. He plays similar characters in the other vids. The art director was Sharron Ward, now an award-winning documentary director. We got everyone dressed up and she bought piles of all that party shit in the video, the streamers etc, and she made jellies and cakes. Everything was going well until someone decided we should have a drink. Halfway through the shoot the alcohol entered, and with all that sugar etc, it turned into mayhem, with people disagreeing with my directions. It made it really hard work, ha ha. That John Wayne Gacy painting above the fireplace is a real one. Ant Timpson bought it, and it gave off a spooky vibe. Then I had to pay for my flatmate Gecko to stay at DeBretts for two nights, because it took so long to clean up. A mad idea. But it looks good.

‘Buddy’ – Snapper (1988)

In 1983 I drove down to Dunedin with Christine Voice and Joanne Billesdon to hang out with Peter Gutteridge, David Kilgour, and Martin Phillipps. That was kind of how Christine Voice and Peter got together, a few years later. They came up to Auckland and played at the Powerstation while recording the EP with Terry Moore at Mascot. They said, “Come down and have a listen.” I did – holy hell, Terry did an amazing job. Hearing that sound off the 1" 16-track recorder, I never heard Snapper like that ever again. Amazing. They wanted to make a video of either ‘Hang On’, with motorbikes, but it was five minutes long, so they said “Let’s do ‘Buddy’.” I guess NZ On Air had kicked in $5000. I booked a flight to Dunedin, and took down the Bolex – a sturdy 16mm windup camera – and some lights, blondes, redheads [gels], and a projector. I stayed at Christine Voice’s studio, and she had hung up all these coloured sheets of plastic, and artwork, within which I filmed the band. And then Peter got hold of these guys from BRONZ – Bikers’ Rights of NZ, who were trying to get the helmet laws rescinded – and they all had British, American, and Italian bikes. It was so cold down there. Having moved from Christchurch to Auckland, I couldn’t handle the cold anymore. I got the flu, and they looked after me. We went to Taieri Plains and filmed the scenes of motorbikes. Stephen Kilroy helped with the lighting, he was good, he hired a truck with a generator so we could film motorbikes racing past us in the dark, with us panning the blonde light onto the bikes. Christine Voice wanted to film at the Portobello aquarium, and we filmed an octopus and shrimp, and Peter.

‘AFFCO’ – Skeptics (1988; QHD version 2024)

There’s been so much written about this already. The interesting thing about it is that it came about because the Skeptics came to Christchurch – we had never heard of them, they were still in Palmerston North – and did a gig like a Tuesday night at the Gladstone. They were the most unusual band ever. They had a light hanging off a cable from the roof, near the floor, and David was swinging it round. It felt dangerous and crazy. I really loved them, and saw them whenever I could. When they started to play ‘AFFCO’, it blew me away, to hear it live, and so in 1987 – when the AXEMEN were doing some recording in Wellington in their studio – I asked if I could make a video of that song. They hadn’t even recorded it. They came up to Auckland – I had moved there after living at their Writhe studio for a few months – and I recorded their gig at the Gluepot on my ghetto blaster. I played back the cassette version of the live recording, to which David [D’Ath] sang along. It was pretty much in time. I got David to come round to my place, filmed him in one of the spare rooms, and as we went on we got more carried away. A flatmate had been working at a Gladwrap factory, we wrapped David up in that, with red food colouring and glycerine as blood. David was so into it, he said, “I’m putty in your hands”. He was awesome to work with, an incredible guy. Unlike anyone else I’ve worked with.

I’d been living in the Red House with ?Fog – Roger and Lindsay – and we’d done a video for their ‘Brian’ song. I asked if they wanted to help me film at a freezing works. We hooned out there in their Morris Minor, to Westfield, drove in, and said to reception that I’m filming a music video ‘AFFCO’. “We’re not AFFCO,” they said. It doesn’t matter, I said. A young teenage kid, the son of the boss, said “Sounds great!” He took us in and showed us the cattle floor. Fucking scary: the guy with a gun fires a bolt into their heads. He was tripping off his nut, with headphones on and music blaring out. “Hi guys, do you want have a go?” and hands us the gun. We declined. Then we went down to the sheep floor, which was much more tidy, so I decided I’ll film down there. I asked the young guy – “Yeah, sure” – I can’t believe we got away with it. I had Roger and Lindsay moving lights around, with extension cords across floor, water on floor … I can’t believe we did it, we filmed the whole process.

Just as we were finishing, I heard shouting, and I think the management had finally found out. The kid said, “Quick, you’ve got to leave …” We slipped out a side door and drove off. You’d never be able to do that now. And there are fewer and fewer abbatoirs around. I wanted to get shots of people packing meat, that’s what Kellax is about – the meat packing company at Mt Wellington. They took frozen animal carcases and bandsawed them, shrink wrapped them, and put them in boxes. So I filmed all that. Those sheep at the beginning were filmed at Logan Campbell Park, I went out on my motorbike with my Bolex. The camera is quite noisy so when I started shooting, they’d turn round and stare right at the camera. When I edited it into the video, it looked like they had a look of horror on their faces.

The update on that is that Ngā Taonga had been hassling me about putting the original ‘AFFCO’ edited film reel into the archives. I said I didn’t want to let it go unless I got a scan done. They’d recently procured Peter Jackson’s first Arriscan film scanner, which could do 16mm. So I said, well how about you do a hi-res scan for me and you can put it in the archives. Five years later I got the scan. I got it as DPX files, where every frame on film is an individual image, like a Tiff file: that way you can retouch each frame. I’m not sure how many hours I’ve spent on it – two or three hundred hours maybe – going through and retouching it all, the dirt and scratches, the white grease pencil used when editing. I cleaned all that up, and it was spliced by tape. And when you have a tape splicer, the film jumps up a bit when scanned, so I’ve fixed all that. Some of the frames, there’s seven layers to make up the frame. Madness. They did a nice job of the scan – the original 2006 YouTube version is 240p (or pixels), which is tiny. Now it’s 1440 pixels: about 20 or 30 times more resolution. So you can read the names on the machines at the freezing works. It’s insane, it looks incredible. Beautiful 16mm grain. This has been 10-14 years in the making. It’s a big deal for me.

How Bizarre (documentary directed by Stuart Page, 2014)

This is the trailer only, 1080p HD

Fred Renata asked me to direct the film, because he loved the Shustak doco. I said I didn’t know anything about ‘How Bizarre’ apart from what everyone knows. He said, “That’s an advantage.” He said that Pauly used to love going to Prego [a Ponsonby restaurant]. So in about 2011, in Pauly’s honour, we went in there to talk about him, just the two of us. We asked for a table, and the maître d’ said, is that for three? Fred said yes. She set the table for three. I remember looking at the wine list, and there was one called “13” – on the cover of the European CD release of ‘Right On’, he can be seen holding up the 13 pool ball. Then Melissa Wikaire from Māori TV turned up, and she said, “What are you guys doing?” We told her, and that’s how we got the broadcasting deal. That 13 thing came up all the time. Incredible.

AudioCulture