This was our first 'Rock Video'. Completed during the first Iraq war, it was done for a local band, Obssession. It was a song about conflict and the fear that we are heading for a global catastrophy of our own making.

The video was shot on Super VHS tape and edited onto a SVHS tape deck with a digital vision mixer to preserve as much quality as possible. (No affordable digital cameras back in 1991!) The video mixer allowed me to do super imposing (putting one image over another), picture in picture and to dissolve one scene into the other for a more 'professional' look. The 'slow motion' effects were achieved by rapidly tapping the frame advance button on the player while recording the result!

The editing for this video was a total nightmare. Because of the heavy drum sounds in it, I wanted to do lots of cuts 'on the beat' and in some sequences, the edits where only a few frames long. Not a problem today if you are editing on a computer but on video machines it went something like this...

1. Find the next scene and put the player machine into pause mode.

2. Get to the end of the last scene recorded and put the recorder into record pause mode.

3. Let the player deck play and release the record machine at the right moment to record the scene you need.

4. Stop both players and check the edit is 'clean' ie no video noise at the cut and that you are happy with the scene.

If you're not, you had to rewind the recorder and set it to pause record, queue up the player and try again. An additional problem with tape is that if it took too many tries at the same place on tape, you could introduce a 'glitch' on the tape. A big horizontal white line right across the video which is actual damage to the recording tape itself. There is no way to get rid of it. The only thing to do was to play past the glitch and start the video from scratch all over again! Oh joy!

In addition to loads of conflict footage taken straight from news broadcasts, we filmed the band and Danny's children (the lead singer/songwriter), acting various scenes and blended it all in with the news footage. In total, it took a weekend to film the band's scenes and 3 five-hour nights plus a weekend to edit it together.

They were really happy with the result and so were we. The band used the video along with some others to hawk around London looking for a record deal but no one would consider the video because, although they liked it, they felt it was too political.

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