After making the Monostereo video (below) I wanted to make a video for one of my favorite Seattle bands, Blessed Light, who my friend German played bass for. Three weeks before my family and I planned on moving out of Seattle, it finally came together. I met with the band's lead singer and founder Toby Gordon and we talked about some ideas. He wanted to make a video for a song German had wrote. I came up with a couple ideas for it, but nothing that begged to be made. German came to me with his ideas, which I liked much more than my own. We were shooting a few days later. It was my first time working on an concept that wasn't totally mine. I found it an intriguing challenge, as I didn't know exactly where it was going, but I think the whole thing turned out pretty unique.   Every time I watch it, it gives me more meaning.   

Starring: Blessed Light

Directed & Edited by: Ross Williams

Written by: German Nuestro

At the premiere of eRATicate my friend Ian, who plays drums for the Seattle band Monostereo, asked if I interested in making a video for them. "Sure," I said. I didn't have much of concept built for it, except the slight story of the band on its way to a show. But I grabbed my super-8 camera anyways and we began shooting. I roamed around Seattle with each band member individually looking for fun stuff to shoot. With Ian, I shot hand-held frame-by-frame to make his stuff look jumpy, like "drums". Damon, the bass player, got the frame-by-frame treatment also, but I put the camera on a tripod and asked him to scoot around to make it look smooth. For Lea, the singer and lead guitarist, I rolled the camera at 12 frames a second to give it a slight "off" look, but to make her section the most consistent. I didn't want to use these techniques all the way through the video, so I employed my talented photographer wife, Kristan, to shoot stills of their show. It was a lot of fun to put together.

Starring: Monostereo

Directed/Shot/Edited by Ross Williams

Photos by: Kristan Kelly

I became friends with The Janks while we were shooting two previous music videos, both directed by Gary Lundgren.  A while later they were on tour, with a stop in Ashland, so they asked me to make video for this song.  The idea was to hang out with them for the day, capture their personalities and cut it together with their live performance.  This is the video I created from that.  Unfortunately since then, there has been some behind-the-scenes drama and the band no longer wanted to use the video for reasons I can’t get into here. 

Directed/Shot/Edited by: Ross Williams

Starring: The Janks

Since the completion of this video, I worked as camera-man on the “Official” video for this song, also directed by Gary Lundgren, see it: HERE

You can also see the music videos for The Janks : “Dead Man” & “Hands of Time”

Both of which I worked on as a production designer.

Surfing the Vimeo website I came across this Moby music video competition.  I didn’t think much of it at first, but after listening to this song for 30 seconds, these images popped into my head.  Suddenly I was obsessed with creating this video.  The deadline was two weeks away. Production included two time consuming aspects, the stop-motion animation and building the robot-suit. With the help of two talented actors and my new Canon 7D camera the video turned out almost exactly like my vision, which is often the toughest thing about filmmaking to pull off.  At this moment, this is my favorite Xrats film.

Written/Directed/Edited by: Ross Williams

Starring: Danielle Kelly & Levi Anderson

I’m not totally sure how to categorize this project, it’s a long-form music video that was made for the Southern Oregon punk band Virus 9.  John Foote produced and directed it for his company Mental Films.  He had a cut done that was mostly a music video, but he wanted it expanded.  I went about cutting it like a short film, trying to build the story and suspense before it bursts into song at the end.  I also did all the sound mixing, color-correction and a few visual effects.

This was the sort of project that I’d love to work on continuously.

Starring: Virus 9

Editing & Post Production by: Ross Williams

Produced & Directed by: John Foote

More Information: Mental Films