Woof Wan-Bau, or Joji Koyama to give him his real name, was born in Tokyo but moved to the UK with his parents aged eight. He moved to London in 1997 and studied fine art at the city’s prestigious Goldsmiths University and has a strong background in design and illustration and also experimental film and video. A friendship with Kieran Hebden, the musician known as Four Tet, led to Woof Wan-Bau’s first video commission, and his work quickly got him signed to Nexus Productions in London. He has won many awards, including the Public Choice Award at the British Animation Awards for his video for Four Tet’s My Angel Rocks Back and Forth. His short film, Watermelon Love, made for Channel 4’s MESH scheme, was hugely well received and he is now working on another short film. Though his Japanese routes are often very visible in his work, in the Japanese comic styling of his Ikara Colt video for example, Woof Wan-Bau has long made London his home and has an increasing reputation as one of the city’s most innovative and exciting filmmakers.

www.woofwanbau.com

Interview Transcript: Woof Wan Bau

My name is Woof Wan Bau. I’ve been making music videos for 4 years now and I’ve also been making short films and animations.

My name was kind of a joke really. I used to work in a restaurant with all sorts of international people and just to pass the time we used to ask everyone what the sound of various sounds of animals in their own language is. The most popular one at the time was dogs. So when I started directing music videos I just thought I’d rather have a silly name and I just combined the sound of dogs barking in English, Italian and German. And I thought it was quite funny because it sounded almost like an Asian name, like Wong Kai-Wai or something, so it was just a silly joke.

I actually never trained formally in any of the kinds of things I do now. I came into it almost accidentally. I studied fine art and it was quite an academic course in that we never really learned anything technical or practical. So after I graduated I felt as though I hadn’t really, I’d learned about lots of ideas and things but I hadn’t really learned any crafts to actually do things. I fell into doing music videos through a friend of mine called Kieran Hebden who makes music under the name of Fourtet. I met Kieran through some friends who at the time were on the same record label as Kieran. He came to see a short film I made just after I graduated which was screened in a small cinema in London. It was just around the time before his record ‘Pause’ came out and he basically said ‘look I need to make a music video would you like to make it?’ At first I didn’t really know what to say because it wasn’t really something – I mean I’ve been interested in music videos as something to watch but to make, it never really crossed my mind. So I was a bit like… I don’t really know if I want to and didn’t really know how either. But he was quite enthusiastic and said just do what you want. We’ll have some fun and lets just come up with something, so that’s how it started.

The idea for that video came from the fact that we couldn’t actually animate that much, so I developed this story where there was a main character that would be very still like a cut out figure, who was somehow lamenting a past where it had been a real human being and could move and could do all these things. I set it almost like an old silent play.

VIDEO: Four Tet ‘My Angel Rocks Back and Forth’

The Ikara Colt video, that’s something I can’t actually remember how it came through but I was asked to pitch an idea for it. I wanted to do something with motion graphics because it was something that I was quite interested in. I wanted to try and push something with that kind aesthetic. I was just looking through old piles of material that I keep around and I found all these templates for Japanese comics which is something that I used to draw myself. The thing with Japanese comics is a lot of the backgrounds, the textures and patterns that are used in it are readily available for anyone to use. That’s one of the reasons it has a very distinct language, because people can mix and match these things to their own liking so I thought it would be great if I could use these things to make them move and create some sort of spectacle out of them. The track was quite loud and noisy, explosive rock, so I thought it fit the bill and that’s how it came through.

VIDEO: Ikara Colt ‘Wanna Be That Way’

Coldcut approached me with the idea of doing a video with fussy felt. I didn’t really know what fussy felt was but when I saw what it was I thought this could be really fun. To start with we just bought a whole bunch of enormous boxes of fussy felt. It’s quite an institution in Britain. I didn’t know what they were or what you were supposed to do with them. Apparently they were invented during the war from the off cuts of felt from bags or I don’t know what they were making during the war. To keep their children happy, from the off cuts they would make these kind of shapes and get them to play with it and that’s apparently how it started. So we just got a whole bunch of this stuff and I laid it all out on a huge table in the studio and just looked at the little characters, like this small girl which I thought was very iconic for a lead role. The great thing with this is although I do quite a lot of character design and designing things I actually don’t really enjoy it that much and the great thing with this is its all already designed and it was just a matter of lying things out. So I laid all this stuff out on the table and started combining bits together to make little characters and objects and scenes, the annoying thing was I’d leave it all out and of course if anyone came up they’d go ‘oh fussy felt!’ and get all nostalgic and start just taking bits and doing their own little scenes to point where I’d completely loose track of where anything was and I started getting really annoyed until one day I came back there were loads of different characters on the table that I hadn’t put together and I thought ‘that’s great’ and took all those which eventually somehow made it into the video.

VIDEO: Coldcut ‘Whistle and a Prayer’

The Duke Spirit video, the idea for that came very quickly which was very unusual for me. I got sent a track and got sent some press photos of the band. One of them was a photo taken during their live shoot. There was something about the picture, it just had the lead singer at the front and she has this incredible bleached blonde hair and the way it was lit made it look like it was some sort of beam of light. So I just went with that and thought about how I could incorporate that into a video where she would appear as various streaks and beams of light that come across different landscapes and different little scenes. Actually for my standards the budget was not that bad but for the idea I wanted to do everything in camera so that you had the beam of light which was her hair actually set within an interior setting or a landscape setting that we could build, but we didn’t have the money to do it so I settled for doing the hair for real but creating the background in CG. Even though, if I feel there isn’t really enough money to pull off an idea I just kind of go ahead and do it anyway because when you come up with an idea you just want to do it. You don’t want to think we can’t do it, we don’t have the money, maybe next time, or leave it for another one. Let’s just do it anyway and see what happens.

VIDEO: The Duke Spirit ‘Cuts Across The Land’

N.B Woof Wan Bau is holding a cigarette throughout this section of the interview. If you do not wish to show this on screen you can skip this section of the interview (the DVD is in chapters and skipping to the next track will miss this section of the interview and the video that follows it).

The Mogwai video was a really wide open brief. Again it was a very small budget and quite a tight schedule. The problem with doing animation with tight schedules is a lot of people seem to think that because of the fact its so readily available in terms of what you see in music videos these days, it’s so ubiquitous that people think it can just happen like that. In actual fact it is a really time consuming thing. Especially with animation I feel like if I’m going to do it then I want to do it, try and do it as well as I can and when the schedules are so tight I tend to pitch a live action idea. So that’s probably the reason why I did a string of live action videos as apposed to animation ones. The Mogwai one, again it was quite an evocative title ‘The Friend of the Night’ which is always helpful actually to have a title to think about, just something to go on. It’s quite difficult, although it is nice to have quite and open brief it’s quite a difficult process where you’re pitching on something like that because it becomes a bit of a gamble. You never really know what the band are going to like or what they want to do with the track. So I went with the title and I don’t really know where the idea came from, I just thought it would be nice to tell some sort of cyclical story with a very still sequence of events that are somehow linked together.

I still plan to continue doing music videos. I will continue to do them as long as people want me to make them. To be honest I think most, especially in the music video industry people see my kind of videos as the viable option for a lot of the bands that do have the big budgets and things like that, which doesn’t bother me. It’s fine. I do what I do so I can’t really give them anymore. So long as someone wants me to make them I’ll make them, but I won’t go out of my way to put lots of girls in bikinis or do crazy slick editing or whatever. It’s not something that appeals to me that much. It’s not something I’m desparately wanting to do and if that means I do an occasional video for an independent label then that’s fine. So long as it’s something that’s going to be fun for me and fun for whoever else is involved, then I’ll keep doing them.   

VIDEO: Mogwai ‘Friend of the Night’