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Jacob's Ladder: Story Board
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In 1985, following a protracted period of sporadic live work with the
band and the completion of The Lost Weekend
album I was finally, after considerable negotiations,
commissioned by WEA in London to produce and direct the promotional
video for the single 'Jacob's Ladder'. In the end, the final
production was co-produced with Ann
Richardson.
Click
on
storyboard
for
expanded
view
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Art Direction was shared between Ann and myself and the
cinematography between myself and Ian Owles. All three of us
worked for many days non-stop because we had decided to work together on all
aspects of production without additional crew. This was extremely hard
work but allowed us to work unconstrained by studios and other peoples
rules. Ian worked for a studio call Crystal, so one weekend we lock
ourselves in for two days and shot the main sequences.
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Ann
and I were living in a run down flat over-looking Clapham Common and it served as
our production office, workshop and studio for making and shooting some
of the smaller sets. The sequences with the Giorgio de Chirico inspired
piazza and the cosmic animation section, the artwork for which was made
by our friend the artist Jake Tilson, were both shot there.
My sketch for the de Chirico scene can be seen on the storyboard sheet below.
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I
can't remember what the budget was but it would have been at the low middle
end of budgets of the time. Jacob's Ladder was shot on 16mm film,
and Ian and I being traditionalists, decided to edit on film not video.
We used the new, at the time, Auto-conforming Film to Video process at Filmatic
Laboratories to process the broadcast master from the film cutting copy.
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Crisis; what crisis? The
crisis, such as it was, centred on time restrictions and in no small part the fact that we didn't have a
telephone and had to contact WEA from the public telephone in Clapham
Common tube station. Understandably, they
were reticent to hand
over large amounts of cash to someone calling from a phone box.
In the end it was due to pressure from WEA that I had to delivered the
video master before I had completed the editing to my satisfaction.
This was unnecessary haste, as it turned out,
because as Bid points out on TMS website, they did not have the single
ready for release.
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The
original
WEA edit as previewed on Top of the
Pops in the mid-80's is not the version that appears on
the VHS Destiny Calling nor the DVD Destiny Always Calls Twice. The version uploaded by others to YouTube is my cutting copy, hence the
dust and
marks, which I re-cut, adding material to the original edit for inclusion
on the Toy Factory Japan VHS in 1990. After promotional use by WEA at the time the original version has not been
seen since - it lives under my stairs!
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Tony and Annie at Clapham Common
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