“It’s a Trojan horse of a song. Images of wooden soldiers are playful and harmless but you are suddenly bombarded with real political issues, colonialism, parked elephants, and reclaiming looted uniforms. “Victory is in peace not war.” Tjinder Singh
With the video director Astrid Edwards took a very punk view on the song because of its guitar lines & played with cut-ups and pre-existing photography and fast moving imagery to put the song back in 70s Britain, to bring out the Bolan boogie of the song.
Here is Astrid Edwards the Director of the ‘I’m A Wooden Soldier’ video to outline her thoughts behind it’s making:
“This particular film is a little homage to the elements and themes of punk fanzines…something close to mine and the band’s collective teenage experience. I’d lurched into teenagehood on a steady diet of hand-stapled Sniffin’ Glue, early ID fanzines and Spare Rib. With that and our current Government in mind, I applied my slightly angry DIY punk ethic creating original artwork, cutting it up into photomontages with good old-fashioned scissors, a scalpel, some glue and a lot of paper with the intermittent re-photographing or old school photocopy thrown in. I then hand animated it, shot, and appeared in it (no budget for a performer) and edited it together myself mostly frame by frame. With some of the more complex scenes I worked with the brilliant designer/animator Sim Tennant in afterfx. It was really free-ing to go back to punk basics, really painstaking but fun – and much like the song, it felt apt and relevant to be working in that way. This is my second collaboration with Cornershop. Both films are quite raw but very different – what’s great is that the band are always so trusting and supportive of my ideas – this one particularly, as it literally came together frame by frame by frame. Analog for the digital generation…” Astrid Edwards
CREDITS: ‘Wooden Soldier’ video – conceived, hand animated, directed, produced, edited by Astrid Edwards Rockmother FIlms
Insta: therockmother
Twitter: @rockmother
Additional digital animation: Sim Tennant
http://www.simeontennant.com/Insta: gosh_what_now
‘Wooden Soldier’ is taken from the Cornershop album ‘England is a Garden’, order your copy via our Ample Play site.
