James Houston is an filmmaker and artist from Glasgow, Scotland. He has been featured throughout numerous print publications and his work has appeared on hundreds of different blogs. Many of his films are characterized by a colorful, retro aesthetic. Mr. Houston was kind enough to answer a few of our questions regarding his films and filmmaking process.

Your degree is in graphic design; traditionally, most people would associate this with print/web design. I have seen some prints you have made, but it seems that film dominates the work found in your portfolio. What initially sparked your interest in film and how long have you been actively creating films?

I almost failed my penultimate year at art school. I didn’t have a great love for creating typography or layout although I’ll always have an admiration for the work of others who do it well. I asked my tutors (Steve Rigley & Jo Petty) if I could go off on my own and try some video experimentation. Luckily, they welcomed the idea and I haven’t opened InDesign since. That was in 2008, the same year that I created the Radiohead video. I owe a lot of thanks to Steve & Jo at GSA for allowing me to take that risk.

What inspired you to create Big Ideas (don’t get any), and what exactly did the conceptual process entail?

It was never intended to be a Radiohead project. Dr. Roland Shregle from Ganjatron.net wrote a tutorial back in the dark ages of the Internet on how to replace a default sound file that’s inside every HP scanner. The original file is Fur Elise and was intended as an Easter egg for early technology enthusiasts. I couldn’t help but notice the excellent bass sound and so the next logical step was to find other instruments that would accompany my bassist. Look Around You probably inspired the final treatment.

I was watching a lot of old vintage YouTube videos that had ‘psychic mediums’ apparently demonstrating supernatural abilities. I wanted to create a video which shows that science and hard work can be just as impressive as fraudulent trickery. I had been sitting on the concept for two years, but couldn’t write any decent music. When In Rainbows was released, I found myself inspired again and decided that Nude worked perfectly.

Has Radiohead contacted you about it? What did they think?

Colin left a nice post on their blog. He called it “brilliant” which is very flattering. I’ve followed their music since my school days and value their work a lot. It was a surreal experience to find out that they had watched and liked it.

What camera did you film it on?

A really crap Sony consumer HD SR-8 camcorder. It’s all I had but it worked. A lot of time and effort was spent on perfecting the overall grade trying to make pixels look like film. I wanted the camera to be from the same era as all these forgotten objects with only the actual music being contemporary. A key theme is that they’re all crying out for attention, trying to prove themselves still worthy of existence in order to avoid the inevitable landfill. According to online feedback it made a few people quite emotional so it looks like the characterisation of inanimate objects was a success. Props to Paul Rand for advising to defamiliarise the ordinary.

Where did you find all of the hardware that was used, were you looking for specific models to create the right sounds?

One man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure. The scanner was bought on eBay (as it had to be the particular model that Roland Shregle outlined) The ZX Spectrum was in the family, although I eventually used a different model for the audio (long grey one a +48k, also in the family.) It sounds much better but isn’t as visually recognisable as the small black Spectrum you see onscreen. A guy on an old mailing list actually noticed the difference in the beeps. Haha. If you feed the first minute of audio into your Spectrum at home, then your computer will play alongside my video. Thanks to Andrew Bruin for giving me the old Epson printer and my friend Daniel Glennie for lending me his oscilloscope. The problem I had with the Spectrums is that the viewer doesn’t have any visual feedback between the computer and the audio. So I wired it up to Daniel’s oscilloscope in order to get a visual representation of the audio. Thanks to Emma Keogh for the Granada Finlandia TV.

How long did the setup take?

I spent a full weekend alone in a studio filming it but had to throw all the footage away as I was plagued with sync issues. It was a very low-budget project so even transporting all the equipment to the studio was a huge problem. I took a few days off then tackled the studio again. This time I only needed a few hours and everything worked perfectly. You wouldn’t have seen the video if it hadn’t worked that day, as I graduated the same week. I had degree show stresses and honestly thought I was wasting my time making computers make noise. The online reception gave me a huge confidence in my work, and I’d like to thank everybody who offered their support. It really meant a lot to me.

Since college – it appears you’ve directed a number of music videos, was this your original goal or has it grown into an interest after you started school?

It was through necessity. The upside of the digital era we’re in is that a lot of skills are portable to different industries. I find it hard to tell people what I do for a living other than “make videos”. I’d like to call myself a director, although those projects are only recently becoming more frequent. Art school gave me an essential understanding of the importance of a solid concept. Everything else can be picked up.

Is there any specific influence for the aesthetic found in most of your films?

I found out early on that it’s effective to use nostalgia to stir up emotion. It’s the same gimmick that Hollywood is using to cash in on all of the re-makes of franchises we love from our childhood. A lot of my personal work reflects the past as I’ve often thought that we took a wrong turn somewhere in the late Eighties. I have tried to treat each commercial project as a unique piece of work and not get bogged down into a distinct aesthetic while keeping my inner-artist content with personal projects.

Your Frightened Rabbit music video feels quite a bit different than your others. Is there any specific reason for this?

There are two sides to the stuff I do. When I create work for myself, I’m in complete control and only finish when I want to show the world. The Frightened Rabbit video was a lot of fun and I really like the band. It was a commercial project to pay the bills.

What is the idea behind the flashlights in the crowd?

We only had £600 (including my fee) to make the entire video. To avoid spending money on lighting I asked all of the unpaid extras (Frightened Rabbit fans found on Twitter) to bring flashlights. I think it worked well considering the limitations of the shoot and helps strengthen the nautical/submerged/sinking theme. I’d love to do a decent-budget video for them as I think that they’re the most refreshing band to come out of Scotland in recent years. They deserve a huge international financial backing.

Do you have much time for personal projects? If so, are you currently working on anything?

I’m a very lucky person. The Scottish Art Council recently awarded me their 2010 film fund. I’ve been given a budget to create a new “major piece of motion graphics” and have been working on it almost exclusively since January. It’s a film about a magician who is in love with a video-game simulation of his dead wife. He has a moral struggle between self-delusion and being honest with reality. It’s based on some research I did while writing my dissertation, I’d secretly record Glasgow psychic mediums giving “readings” to members of their spiritualist congregation. It’s really exploitative stuff. My film won’t be as direct, as I’m using the metaphorical world of video games to tell my story. The Daily Mail [Fox News of the UK] didn’t understand my concept and wrote about the film here.