Q&A with Shoot The Player’s Amelia Tovey-- Local Cut

Q&A with Shoot The Player’s Amelia Tovey

July 2nd, 2009 [5:37PM] Posted by: Michael Mannheimer | 1 COMMENT

Last Saturday, on my way from Superfest to a friends’ party, I stopped at the food carts on 12th and Hawthorne. Everything was pretty typical for a weekend night there—lots of bikes and dogs and people waiting in line for poutine—until James Mitchell from Nurses informed me that maybe I shouldn’t leave just yet. It turns out the band, through a weird series of luck, was able to film a video for Shoo the Player, the Australian branch of the Take Away show. I really couldn’t get away without putting on the journalist hat for a minute, and after meeting Shoot the Player’s Amelia Tovey and exchanging information I was able to conduct this quick interview with her a few days later via email. Look out for Shoot the Player vids from Nurses, Tender Forever, and Lovers in the next month.

WW: How did you wind up in Portland? It’s a long way from Australia!

Amelia Tovey: Portland has always sounded like my kind of town. I recently began collaborating with photographer Molly Landreth and together we’ve been touring around the USA compiling both video and photographic portraits for her work “Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America.” Portland was our the last city on our list, which was great because we really went out with a bang and were able to enjoy our time here. Portland definitely made it in our top 3 cities in the USA we could live in. (The others were Austin & San Fran.)

Did you have any bands in mind when you were here, or did you kind of seek them out after arriving.

I’m a big fan of the Portland music scene. Through YouTube and MySpace I’d heard of Tender Forever and Lovers and so made plans to film them before I arrived. I’m also a big fan of Laura Viers and Mirah and would love to film them (if they’re interested!) next time. But I’m sure there are many many artists I’ve never heard of—so far I’ve only skimmed the surface. Nurses were a band I heard of over coffee the day i arrived in Portland. Then they happened to be playing that
night and when we asked them to film a video they were really excited and 2 hours later we had cameras rolling. It all happened so quickly and spontaneously! When we filmed Ben Lee a few months ago he really got into the spontaneous spirit of things and said “You know, you see a door, you walk through it” – it’s kinda become our motto.

How did Shoot the Player start? I’ve been watching a bunch of the videos on the site and they’re all pretty cool. Is it really a part of the Take Away show empire?

Shoot The Player is a spin off / homage to Vincent Moon and Chryde’s Take Away Shows. I was a big fan of their work on La Blogotheque and at a chance meeting with Vincent in Paris I asked if there was room for the project to be extended to Australia. He was really encouraging and so my friend Jonathan and I teamed up and the two of us have been producing filmed for www.shoottheplayer.com ever since. We started making the films around our neighborhood in Sydney and this is the first time we’ve taken the project offshore. I love the musicality of cinema, and I love long shots of landscapes on screen. I also have a lot of friends who need music videos so it all came together really easily.

I loved the way you shot not just Nurses but the whole scene around the block—the fry cart, people sitting and eating, nearby bikes. What is your perfect shooting location?

When we shoot bands we’re also shooting the landscape as a character. The perfect landscape is a place with lots of people and lots of variation, a place the musicians can interact with and use in their performance. A quintessentially local place is also important, we’re really interested in showcasing ‘place’, cities, neighborhoods, or largely ‘unseen’ parts of the world that don’t usually end up on screen. I love that my friends at home who watch the Portland videos can get an intimate sense of what Portland is like as well as the music that’s from here.

Links:
Shoot the Player
Nurses

Photo courtesy of Shoot the Player

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