Ben Barnes
This news has been a long time coming: the formal addition of our longtime friend and colleague Ben Barnes to the masthead of the Masses. Ben, a director of Pittsburgh descent, has long been part of our social and creative family, has offered insight on a range of Masses-related conversations over the years, has been at all of our best parties, has lugged gear on shoots out of the kindness of his heart. Basically, he’s been here for us.
So to finally make it official is to breathe a happy sigh of relief, because Ben has done some beautiful, emotionally rich work. Take his most recent video, a two-parter for the great Bay Area band Why?. Shot for the songs “These Hands” and “January Twenty Something,” Ben’s creation moves from surreal tragedy to stoic honesty in a single bound. In the first half, we watch a man pin-cushioned with arrows as he wobbles toward the scene of a car accident. We see him, with pain but also grace, help a wounded child make his way to safety. The second half features Why? main-man Yoni Wolf and band giving a straight-up, no-nonsense performance on a Hollywood rooftop. No bells and whistles needed: just great framing and editing to go with an excellent song.
Ben first started working with frames as a cartoonist in high school and college and directed his way through film school at The University of Miami. Armed with a few award-winning shorts, he landed in Los Angeles in the early ’00s, got a job at the great Amoeba Music as an expert on experimental electronic music — and fell in with like-minded souls in the LA IDM crowd. His club night, Forestry Service, debuted in 2003 and drew lots of creative types, including our friends and collaborators at Dublab. Through that connection, Ben has created a number of striking Dublab Vision Version shorts for, among others, Stevie Jackson of Belle & Sebastian, Kyp Malone (TV on the Radio), Why?, and Langhorne Slim.
His series of promos for Busdriver, created for Anti-, might best showcase the breadth of Ben’s work. In six distinctive clips, he and the ace LA rapper offer short video snapshots of the artist. We see Busdriver as birthday boy, tennis player, self-serious artiste, head-crammed lyrical machine, budding acoustic guitarist, and baffled editorialist. Combined, we see an artist overflowing with ideas.
Equally inspired are Ben’s five promo videos for heavy metal conceptualists Coheed & Cambria, which pose curious, menacing questions about the band’s ongoing narrative. His funny promo for Peter, Bjorn & John featured a bunch of people trying, with varying degrees of success, to replicate the whistling in their hit “Young Folks.” These works, both for Sony, squeeze massive amounts of information into very small windows.
Outside of his music video work, Ben is co-creator of the comedy series “Fish Out of Water,” which features as its star a two-foot-eleven fish in a sweater; the shorts were official selections at the 2008 and 2009 SXSW Film Festivals and the 2009 Montreal Just For Laughs Comedy festival. He also just finished a short film called God Damn King Kong, a freewheeling letter to an ex-love from a man with a tenuous hold on his faculties.
Check out Ben’s work and see why we are so thrilled to have him aboard. The Masses are happy to help bring his visions to life with the same generosity of spirit that he’s always offered us.