I was commissioned to make the official video for Bella Darnell’s Strangers with Memories. The brief for this video was open ended and came with a huge amount of creative freedom. Early on, I settled on a found footage collage style illustrating how moments are captured, stored and recontextualized into new narratives (a bit of a personal obsession, to be honest).
The themes of memory and relationship in Bella’s lyrics are explored visually along with our attempts to capture and to recreate our emotional landscapes through the physical technology of recording media. This exploration is visually represented through a tapestry of vintage footage, sourced from the vast archives of the Internet Archive.
The choice to use vintage clips here was deliberate, adding a layer of nostalgic texture to the narrative as well as underscoring the theme of memory preservation. This project is a tribute to the ways we attempt to hold onto the past, even as the technology we use evolves and changes.
Check out Bella Darnell on Spotify.