Toby Rodwell’s Movie Music Videos

Written by Toby Rodwell, Edited by Alejandra Benavides and Rafaelia Socratous

These music videos are part of an ongoing series of projects that I am undertaking by myself, primarily with the goal of honing my editing skills and learning more ways to improve in montage, because I hold the conviction that exploiting montage, especially at a low-budget, allows you to accomplish so much more than you could otherwise. The process is fairly simple, I harvest clips from scenes and trailers of films I really like that I think share an overarching ‘vibe’ and try to re-piece them into a new sequence that corresponds with a song that I like. It is comparable to breaking a completed jigsaw puzzle and building a completely different picture. I always find that as soon as I dump the clips and songs into the software, they just seem to make themselves. I’ve tried in each of them to make a flow that makes sense, some more organic than others, and while each one possesses an underlying mood and repeated motifs, I certainly didn’t intend particular messages. Nevertheless, these projects have helped me visualise connections between films I might not have seen otherwise. It has also taught me the extent to which I can manipulate existing imagery into an entirely new context, which I suppose is the best way to emphasise just how important precise editing is in a film.

Please Note: due to the nature of how my software exports projects, it sometimes glitches the image, which is particularly noticeable early in the “London’s Calling” video.