The video to Stealing Sheep's latest song begins with an apparently mundane folk dance, but as anyone familiar with such things knows, it's going to get just a little bit stranger with every step.
Director Dougal Wilson captures just the right golden-hour atmosphere to make the village—which one is it? (Update: Turville)—acquire that perfectly timeless, faintly unnerving English vibe. Keep your eyes on the background for pagan treats.
I asked Wilson about his techniques and he graciously replied.
[It] was shot on the Alexa by Marc Gomez del Moral, and we used a 24-70mm zoom (I think) – but we fixed this around 28mm. The reason for a zoom was so we could do an in-camera zoom into the windmill at 3'03" – but we ended up doing the zoom in post as it was too tricky to do it precisely in camera with so much else going on. We tried our best to make it look like one take but there are some obvious cut points which I'm sure you can see. We wanted to shoot on film but were worried about losing light as we knew the days would be quite long to do all the choreography and Steadicam moves, so we ended up on digital then Jean Clement-Soret at MPC graded it using references from old 1950s/60s postcards and added some grain. Hope that's nerdy enough for you!
Update: the village is Turville, Buckinghamshire, reports reader jsroberts.
Stealing Sheep – Apparition [Vimeo]
