The winner of the Best Shock Award "Dead Dreams Falling", is a visually captivating and experimental musical short film that will also be presented at an upcoming event. In an exclusive interview, the creator reveals their creative process, inspirations, and unique approach to visual storytelling.

What was the creative process behind the music video DEAD DREAMS FALLING?

As a multidisciplinary artist, it has always been clear to me that I wanted to contribute to create forms of complex audiovisual poetry based on some of my music and ideas. Though I started as a rock and blues-based guitar player when I was adolescent, I evolved towards experimental hybrid forms of music that people would often call cinematic. So I decided to use this soundtrack-type of music to co-create dance-theatre performances or full shows and music videos as well. It just took me some time to be in the right position to be able to fund and produce those ambitious projects, and to find the right partners to create with. For Dead Dreams Falling, Craig Murray has been an obvious choice. I knew his work thanks to what he had done for the likes of Mogwai, Alcest and other artists. I contacted him, and lots of conceptual talks quickly followed. It was clear to us from the start that we wanted to make something that would be more like an experimental musical short movie than a classic music video.

How does music influence visual storytelling?

For Dead Dreams Falling, music has had a huge impact on the visual storytelling. Not only because of the structure and the rhythm of the track, as the evolution of the narrative had to adapt to it. It also certainly influenced deeply the purpose and the general meaning of the film. One of the main themes I work on in my poetry and in my music as well is what I call "Grace and Disgrace entwined". It's a concept I had constantly in mind when I created the musical movements and entanglements that structure Dead Dreams Falling, and we had specific discussions about that with director Craig Murray. Especially around the end of the first third of the track and throughout its last third after the central bridge, there is a constant tension within the music between lyrical movements of elevation and dark forces of gravitation that tend to annihilate these efforts to ascend and bring them back to some sort of dark fate. Grace and Disgrace go hand in hand and the swirling movement of their dance is like the entanglement of two complementary yet opposite DNA helix movements. Life and Death in the same movement, the same swirl. Grace and Disgrace entwined, DNA helix entanglements, Life And Death in the same swirl : I guess it's pretty clear how those concepts that structure the music have influenced the construction of the narrative and the visual content as well.

What inspired the use of the super 8 format?

The narrative of Dead Dreams Falling combines several levels of reality and temporality. Once the general concept had been set, it became more and more obvious that an intro and an outro would be needed to achieve the vision we shared for this project. We needed something that would feel like a prequel of what was going to happen during the main part of the film. It was Craig Murray's idea to use the super 8 format for this part, and as purist he insisted that we'd use real super 8 as opposed to applying an effect and faking it. It was the perfect idea for what we had in mind for that part, as we needed something that could be envisioned as an old family tape back to when the mother of the two main characters was pregnant. But we have also introduced a subtle twist that can make you wonder whether there isn't something wrong with that souvenir from the past. Is it real or is it a dream ? Or maybe a vision of a past reality that has been subverted and altered ?

How does the music video reflect the themes of loss and completeness?

Dead Dreams Falling is about the deep feeling of being torn between the irrepressible quest for a certain form of completeness and the equally incoercible sentiment of being deprived of it forever. It's a metaphor for the human condition and the intrinsic incompleteness we are all confronted with at some point or another. There is a tragic beauty in this frailty which results from the feeling of ontological loss. And there is also a fantastic power that is related to this frailty as it nourishes a tremendous burst of life. It's a very ambivalent phenomenon. The film is focused on the ontological link between two twins as seen as the two viscerally related yet separated parts of a same entity. The twins complement each other as the two halves of a supposed perfect identity, so that the loss of one half can only haunt the other in the deepest way. Whether you believe that everything that happens in the narrative is all in the sister's head, or that she literally feels in her own flesh the agony of her accidented brother, or that she's haunted by what could have been if her second half wasn't stillborn, it will come down anyway to the tension between the mournful feeling of ontological loss and the vibrant quest for completeness.

Can you elaborate on the choice of narrative structure in the music video?

The film has been structured as a quantum entanglement explored through the interconnection of several levels of reality and temporality which are all versions of the same story. Each level tends to have an impact on every other. What is, maybe. What may have been. What could have been. What might have been altered or even deleted retroactively. While structuring the narrative, we made it sure that it would raise more questions than it would provide definitive answers that would narrow the spectrum of the possible interpretations and questionings that we wanted to explore. Moreover, we made it sure that the possible questions and interpretations which would emerge at various moments of the film would find echoes in other moments, so that the credibility of multiple interpretations would be reinforced at the same time the more a viewer would rewatch the film. What is real. What is metaphorical. What might have been just a dream. The question remains.

What are your upcoming projects or goals in the near future?

With Craig Murray, we have just finished the edit of our second musical short movie, a 14mns multidimensional monster that is now set for post-production and grading. I have another music video that is already written, and the pre-production process is almost done. It will be shot this summer by a promising young French director, but I'd rather wait until it's done before elaborating on this project. I am really looking forward to concretizing this vision. In addition to these cinematographic projects, I explore animation as an alternative vector. Director Justine Gasquet has already created an animated music video based on my music, and I am currently working on the writing and pre-production process for another experimental animated music video with two Argentinian artists I am very honored to work with. It's too soon to talk about it, as we're still in the early steps of the process, but I am really excited by that collaboration as well. Last but not least, I am working on producing new dance-theatre performances, notably with a great Greece-based butoh artist named Vicky Filippa. We have several concepts we plan to work on in the near future. Maybe we'll adapt some of these concepts to create short in situ performances we could propose to some festivals that want to add a "happening dimension" to their event.