New Directors: Ali Dickinson and Jack Walker

London record label Workshop’s new series, Music In Colour, is all about pairing up emerging creative talents in the fields of music and film. Judging by the first fruits of the initiative – a sweetly surreal promo for British house music producer Alex Arcoleo’s new track, First Sunset, helmed by Ali Dickinson and Jack Walker – they’re not doing too badly on the matchmaking front.

Based on a children’s book by Dickinson’s partner Naomi Stafford, the film follows a friendly cloud who’s shunned by sun-worshippers for his pesky habit of throwing shade. Things are looking a tad lonely for billy-no-mates Nimbo, until he finds an appreciative pal in a pale-skinned ginger-haired lad. The promo marks Dickinson and Walker’s directing debut: a copywriter/art director team at FCB Inferno by day, they had always been interested in directing but were “just waiting for the right project”. The chance came about through music consultant Liam Klimek, who they’d previously worked with via Audio Network, Workshop’s parent company. “I’m not sure he was actually offering us the job,” Dickinson says, “but we leapt on it and gave him no choice.”

First Sunset might have been the ‘right’ project, but the pair admit the timing couldn’t have been worse, as they were in the middle of shooting a big ad and ended up working weekends and evenings to bring their directing vision to life. The concept was inspired by 90s music videos, which they are both self-proclaimed fans of. “Modern music videos are often so cool and edgy or overly stylised that they can lack a little soul. We wanted to make something that went against that trend – and I guess that’s how we ended up with a dancing cloud,” explains Walker. However the deliberately lo-fi aesthetic belies an incredibly time-consuming production process, almost five months in the making, thanks to the intricacies of creating and shooting a free-floating cloud puppet in-camera without recourse to CGI or green screen.

“We started off by sketching out how we felt Nimbo would look and then [puppet-maker] Emma [Powell] took it to the next level,” explains Walker. “There were loads of logistical and framing challenges, so as the puppet developed we had to adapt how we wanted to shoot the project against the limitations.” The puppet’s strings were then removed in post, a lengthy process. Nonetheless, he adds, the decision paid off: “There’s something really special about the texture on the cloud and there’s real comedy about simply switching his expressions on cuts. You can’t get that with expensive special effects.”

Aside from this, the biggest challenge, say the duo, was “trying to schedule a day [for shooting] where the sun was actually shining – without that, the idea died.” Two days before the shoot – with the entire crew having been on standby for three weeks – it started snowing; “then, out of nowhere, we had two days of sunshine, which was ridiculously lucky.”

And the pair’s future directing prospects look similarly bright: since the release of First Sunset, independent labels have been in touch and there’s a follow-up project with Arcoleo on the cards. Ultimately, they hope to both write and shoot their adverts: “It’s always a hard sell-in to the client, but we’re hopeful that the right moment will present itself.”