Anna's Anchor - Behind The Scenes of "Signal Tower" Video
"Irish native Marty, the solo artist behind emo meets indie punk act Anna’s Anchor, is very proud of his country. Having just wrapped a tour from its most Southerly to Northern-most point, he has literally travelled the length and breadth of the country, playing in his own words: “places no punk band has ever gone before and ever will (for good reason)!”. The run itself was inspired by filming for the video ‘Signal Tower’ which is out now. Marty explains, “We said we’d go to as many landmarks as possible in 4 days. We filmed for 14 hours straight each day, travelled 1300 miles and visited 200 locations. It’s the ultimate Irish road trip incorporated into one short music video!”
To find out more about the creation of this unusual video, we spoke to the man himself for some behind the scenes insight and candid photos…"
Why did you decide to lead with this track? When I was first writing the album, Signal Tower felt like a stand out song from the get go. It was short, snappy and to the point so I felt it would be a great first introduction to the album. Due to the length of the song, I kind of had the idea for the video in my head before we finished mixing the songs so it just made sense to roll with that!
Tell us more about the video and how the concept came about… The video is a super quick tour of all of Ireland in under two minutes. 200 landmarks from North to South and East to West. The background is changing less than every second while I’m in the one spot. Since Anna’s Anchor started, I’ve always wanted to take it to really unique and interesting places. Since I just tour acoustically, it’s been a lot more accessible to play these weird and wonderful places, particularly around Ireland. I had done a song writing project/tour called the islands and that kind of re-sparked my love for the Ireland and everything it has to offer, so I wanted to just try and definitively encompass that in one video, so what better way to do that than travel literally the length and breadth of it for one video?! Luckily, my friend who directed it, had a similar concept stewing around in his head too so we found a middle ground and hit the road!
We travelled 1300 miles; we split it over two weekends, Friday to Sunday working for 12-14 hours each day. We started out at the Giants Causeway, right up on the North coast, worked our way down to Dublin stopping off at places such as Newgrange and The Titanic Quarter in Belfast. We hit all the popular landmarks in Dublin such as St. James’ gate, the spire, poolbeg towers and then it was onwards to Wicklow where we hit up this super spooky indian statue garden called Victoria’s way and the beautiful Powerscourt waterfall. The second weekend was the west coast so we started in Clonakilty in Cork, finished in Galway taking in places such as the Cliffs of Moher, Killarney and everyone’s favourite, Father Ted’s house!
Who did you pick as your director? It was directed by one of my best friends, Oscar Hackett from Long Lost Designs. Oscar has been a huge part of AA. Other than myself, I don’t think anyone else has dedicated more time to my music than him and to have a graphic designer and videographer who shares the same desire for adventure and challenging yourself as much as I do is really incredible. The man gave up a week of his time to drive around in a van with me but I think it was totally worth it and he killed it!
Did anything unusual happen on your adventures? Well I should point out, most of these locations are all well known landmarks where there were a lot of people around. So to set up a camera, small speaker and sing a song and draw that kind of attention, that may times to yourself in public, is pretty funny and embarrassing in itself.
One standout shot was in Killarney: it has these horses and carts for the tourists, so I was going to sing beside the horses. We asked the owner if it was cool and he said, “Oh, you’ll have to sing it beside Rosie”, he lead us to the horse, started singing away. The horse kept kind of hitting its head off of me, in a playful but ultimately super distracting manner. We kept going trying to get the shot, but then it must’ve thought my wallet in my jeans pocket was food or something, so it just latched onto the wallet and bit it, not willing to let go. I nearly had the pocket ripped out of my jeans and we didn’t even really use the shot in the end!
Finally, what are your thoughts on the outcome and how has the response been? I’m really stoked with how it came out. When I brought the idea to the director, Oscar, I told him I wanted it to look almost a green screen effect with how often it was changing - but then the fact that it actually isn’t green screened and the length we travelled would make it look super impressive. Funnily enough some trolls online have been saying stuff like, “not impressed, green screen”, so I guess we did too good of a job in the end!
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