Ninian Doff: Potty in Post

With his multi-angle, single takes, split screens with unchanging centres and crows with human arms, Ninian Doff baffles his collaborators and gets himself in major production pickles – but delights his audience. David Knight meets the editor-turned-director who describes himself as a ‘masochistic idiot’.

Ninian Doff has done it again. Late last year, he was directing a music video for US indie-rocker Darwin Deez – and as with nearly all of his videos, this one involved a compelling VFX trick.

In the video for Free (The Editorial Me), Darwin plays a supermarket worker stacking cereal packets onto shelves, who happens to be stuck in a time-loop – the same five seconds are being repeated over and over again around him, during which a girl enters the store and spills her coffee everywhere. As Darwin gradually realises his weird predicament, he tries unsuccessfully to escape the glitch, gets frustrated, and then with a superhuman effort, finally manages to break out of the store, and the loop.

For this to happen, Ninian shot the girl’s sequence from five camera points in a single take. Then Darwin performed his part of the story, captured from the same angles. Shooting in Los Angeles in a real mini-mart, Ninian says the process was straightforward – in theory. “It’s a simple plate shot. He’s on one side, she’s on the other.”

Well, that was the theory. “Of course they overlap in almost every single shot,” he reveals – which meant lots of clean-up work was required in post, frame by frame.  “When the cereal box flies through the air I’m thinking: ‘that’s alright, it’s only got to be twelve frames’. I prefer that he throws himself at the door than carefully avoids crossing frames – that’s a good thing. The video is king while I’m shooting it. Then one week later in post I’m just so angry at myself – cursing my own name, calling myself a dick, beating myself up and weeping.”

Ninian is one of that new generation of DIY filmmakers who, with a combined facility for shooting and post production, can singlehandedly craft the sort of visually inventive videos that just a few years ago would require serious cash and manpower. And what he’s created for the likes of Graham Coxon, JJ Doom, Fulton Lights and now Darwin Deez, has been original, entertaining, beautifully executed – made on some seriously modest budgets. There’s no question that this engaging, energetic ?? year old Scotsman, has put brain, heart and soul into each of them.

For Fulton Lights’ Staring Out The Window he executed a startlingly simple yet brilliant idea – he put arms on crows – and then has one of the birds become a 60s-style pop star; in Graham Coxon’s What’ll It Take he created a dancing man from the crowd-sourced footage of dozens of the Blur guitarist’s fans;  in JJ Doom’s Guv’nor, the legendary rap star’s trademark face mask is the fixed point in a unique split screen video.

And it seems that each video has led Doff into a certain degree of post-production torment. For example with Fulton Lights, he filmed crows on London’s Clapham Common, then asked his friend, the comedian David Watson, to provide his waving arm footage. He was confident that they would match up, but actually happy to give Watson considerable freedom of expression. “It took four or five months! Just me on my own, in the dark depths of After Effects…”

Ninian jovially describes himself as “a masochist and an idiot.” But would he have it any other way? That’s unlikely. He is someone who prides himself on his productivity, and always seems to have a number of side projects happening simultaneously. Short films, comedy sketches, FX experiments, with numerous collaborations with comedians and actors – and often appearing on-camera himself – Ninian just likes to keep making things, often quickly, rather than “over-think” a script. In fact, when shots talked to him in the lead-up to Christmas, he’d just finished a short festive film for digital agency LBi, titled Cool Unicorn Bruv, that was made in less than a week (and featuring, bizarrely, a very realistic-looking unicorn...).

And this is a big reason why music videos are now his main focus. “You might spend a year funding a short film, with ideas that have been overworked. With music videos you can write an interesting script, and the entire thing can exist four weeks later. Or three weeks. Or sometimes in one week if they really want to kill you. I don’t think there’s anything else that has that mix of freedom and turnaround.”

With an English father, a Dutch mother, named after a 4^th or 5^th century Scottish saint and brought up mostly in Edinburgh, Ninian caught the filmmaking bug as a young teenager, when he joined a pioneering film group called SKAMM (Scottish Kids Are Making Movies) – the brainchild of film critic Mark Cousins and the late Shona Wood – and was also handed a press pass to the Edinburgh Film Festival.

Ninian went on to study film and theatre at Bristol University, “but I feel that I learnt a lot more when I was 15 in this film group,” he says. He has been creating short films ever since. And his inclination towards the editing process led him, following university, to a job as in-house editor at DDB London. While there he started working in motion graphics and After Effects. “Then it seemed like music videos got brilliant again about five years ago,” he says. A big admirer of the work of the likes of Keith Schofield, Megaforce, Patrick Daughters, and latterly, the Daniels – directors who combine strong ideas, visual effects and comedy, he adds, “These guys came and it seemed like you’re an idiot if you wanted to make short films.”

His first non-spec music video came for Andrew Spencer Goldman, aka Fulton Lights, in 2008, where, for the track Sideways Glances and Coded Speech, he motion-tracked the head of the New York-based singer onto cardboard boxes worn by the actors in his London-set video. Then his first video with any kind of budget was for the BBC’s New Music festival in 2009. Budding directors were invited to submit scripts to make videos for then up-and-coming British pop acts Florence and the Machine and Metronomy. Ninian was selected to make the Metronomy video for On Dancefloors, and hooked up with zany comedian/actor Rich Fulcher – best known for his role in cult British TV show The Mighty Boosh. “It was totally over-ambitious,” he laughs. “I decided we were going to back-project everything, so the actor would see the amazing backgrounds – like 1910 special effects, with After Effects. It was good for Rich – but it worked too well. It just looks like a greenscreen video!”  But a year later Fulcher got in touch again to ask him to direct his short film So You Wanna Be A Music Video Director?, a satire on the pop promo world in the YouTube age, made for the 2010 UK Music Video Awards.

That also coincided with the release of Smoga – another excellent comic short he directed, made with actress/writer Cecilia Fage. It’s a spoof Eastern European infomercial for an exercise video extolling the combined virtues of yoga and smoking – which became eventually became an online and festival hit. That was excellent for his credentials as a comedy director, but by this point Ninian was determined to make progress in music videos.

He had quit the day job at DDB in 2010, so when Fulton Lights’ Andrew Spencer Goldman contacted him again in early 2011, saying he would love a video for a song from his new EP, the timing was perfect. And he already had the ingenious idea for Staring Out The Window. “Pigeons bop and sparrows hop around – but I realised crows walk as if they have shoulder blades. The moment I saw that, I could see how much they should have arms. And in my head they were so humiliated that they had to pick up food in their beaks!” Originally he thought about making a noir-style short film, but realised that a music video made far more sense for important reasons. The first was the script, and it was still difficult to get the footage to turn one of the crows into a 60s Tom Jones-style pop star.  He was nearly scuppered by the superior avian intelligence of crows. “I wanted to film crows in front of a greenscreen, and brought it down to Clapham Common. I also brought bread and cake, to lure them in front of the greenscreen – and the crows wouldn’t go near it. They knew it was artificial. So I had to go through rotoscoping hell, to get the ‘pop video’ shot at the end.”

Staring Out The Window was months of work, but it was achievable, and, when finally completed, it transformed Ninian Doff’s profile – which was his prime objective. “Without sounding calculating it was completely approached as a calling card video. I wanted to become a video director, I didn’t want to dabble at it. It was a world that I cared about way more than any other genre.”

Furthermore, he quickly followed up with another video with another utterly charming concept, for his friend, singer-songwriter Martin Brooks. Ninian was determined to avoid falling into another post-production black hole straight after the Fulton Lights video, and this was the reaction: a demonstration of what’s described in its title as ‘A Professional Display of No Handed Bike Moves’, by numerous friends on London’s Hackney Marshes on a very sunny day. “Martin had this song called Golden Tree that was really summery, and I just told people to get down to Hackney Marshes on the shoot day when they could. I had a list of a 100 bike moves to pick and choose, and everyone picked up on it so fast. People were like ‘I think I’ll do ‘graceful swan’ and then I’ll go into a ‘Hitler salute’…”

His Martin Brooks video has fared even better than Fulton Lights in terms of YouTube views – and both videos were instrumental in him joining Pulse Films towards the end of 2011, signed by head of music video Laura Tunstall. He secured his first proper record label commission, for Graham Coxon’s What’ll It Take, soon afterwards. But it meant another huge post-production challenge – and engaging with the label’s own idea to make a crowdsourced video. That was inspired by the song’s chorus – “what’ll it take to make you people dance?” – and initially Ninian was resistant. “I thought of many other videos that have done crowdsourcing well, and I never want to say the words: ‘it will be like that video’ in a treatment.” But then he remembered one of his own lo-fi FX experiments, when he extended his arms and legs with extra footage of arms and legs, by stitching them together. That inspired his idea of a dancer who’s super-long legs and arms are comprised of crowdsourced footage of the limbs of Coxon fans. “That was something I felt I hadn’t seen, and then I wanted to make it.” he says.

Having filmed a dancer on the streets of London, doing almost the whole video, he then broke it down to five key moves, and made a video for Coxon fans that went online and told them to replicate those moves.  Inevitably, he feared this would be met with complete indifference, but his fears were unfounded. “Graham has obsessive fans, globally, so we had 90 submissions from 26 countries. I love that you see snow in some shots, American sun in another shot. I didn’t want anyone who had done something not to be in the video – so it reached a point where it was: ‘no more please!’”

What’ll It Take was a big creative success – again achieved on a small budget – and he followed it up with a second Coxon video, for Ooh Yeh Yeh, made on an even smaller budget. But it was his first where he actually directed the artist performing the music in the video – shooting Coxon in a sunlit East London street. And it also incorporates another really off-the-wall idea, featuring a character made simply from clothes that are in the process of being dropped, with Doff using the few frames where they are in the vague shape of being worn. “Graham said the song was about when you get up early to get some milk and you get that really weird feeling if you meet someone who’s been out all night. And obviously I didn’t want to just shoot a guy who’s wrecked.” He says that for technical reasons, partly to do with budget, he is less satisfied with the execution in Ooh Yeh Yeh than his other videos.

On the whole, in the past 12 months he has begun to rely on other crew for the first time, particularly in terms of the photography, art department, casting and grade.  “That’s been a profound improvement,” he says. However, he also reveals that his thought-processes have also at times bamboozled his collaborators – particularly his JJ Doom video for Guv’nor last summer. Ninian describes the idea – where two sides of Doom’s mask is the consistent unchanging element at the centre of a split screen – as “simple”. But he reveals that crewmembers, including the DoP, struggled to understand how it would work. “I had meetings that fell apart because nobody could get past the first point.”

In short, the Guv’nor video is two different half-shots in two different settings, but in which Doom’s movements more or less match up (and that is the real Doom in the video, Ninian confirms), then stitched together in post, stabilised around Doom’s famous mask. Quite simple in fact, but the effect is quite unsettling.  “What I love about it is all the flaws, so his head turns slightly on one side, so it means his whole mask buckles or warps.” But he points out that he knew it would essentially work, because he had made a test video to explain what would happen – something he’s done for all his videos. “Every treatment I double my workload by including the video test that proves its possible!” he says.

Being totally based around the visual trick, The Doom video was an exception among the many treatments he wrote in 2012, because the track is relatively short. “Hopefully I have the sense to get enough narrative in them.” But he agrees that an ability to develop storylines and work with actors has been more evident in his comedy sketches than his videos – at least until he worked with Darwin Deez.

For the Deez video, the complicated structure in the song, and Darwin’s own idiosyncratic briefing, completely informed his idea. “The song has a real loop in the chord structure, and Darwin also wrote some stream-of-consciousness ideas, and somewhere mentioned Groundhog Day. I condensed it down to a five-second video loop. And the track beautifully breaks down into sad, slow bits, then gets really ragey and builds up again. It gifted the entire narrative.”

It was meticulously planned, initially because he could not figure out how long the loop should be. “Then I realised that the only way I could do this was to make the entire video first as an animatic.” Even then, with making an animatic beforehand and days of rotoscoping after the shoot, he emerged from the experience smiling. The way the visual effects work seamlessly within the story marks the next development in his progress – and he got to shoot in LA for the first tiime. “I was so happy that happened, because it could not look the way it does unless it had been shot in LA.”

2013 certainly promises to be another busy year. Advertising is a mostly uncharted territory as yet for Ninian, but that looks sure to change – and he was outraged to discover that his first Coxon video had effectively been remade as an ad for a Swedish yoghurt brand last year, without his consent. He has his usual raft of comedy side projects simmering away, including a web series, and a sitcom he’s writing with collaborator David Watson. But everything points to him building on his music video portfolio – and who knows, maybe even divesting himself of some of his post-production duties?

“I think there’s a style in the post production, that comes through because I’m doing it,” he says. “But there’s also no reason for me to do all the grunt work. So I think that I need to rope in a kind-hearted intern – or get bigger budgets…”