Niall Trask Interview

Niall is a video artist who creates visuals for bands. He uses a mix of stock footage and his own filmed material to create psychedelic and colorful visuals. He incorporates glitch sequences and a feedback loop to give a low-res, broken TV set effect. Niall improvises his visuals based on the sound and style of each band, except for one band that sent him footage to use. He also ties the visuals into the overall aesthetic of the festival. Niall is looking forward to seeing bands like The Cosmic Dead, Earthless, and It's been in The Witch at the festival. After Raw Power, Niall will be preparing for Flamingods' upcoming tour and working on a short film. Okay, I'm here with Niall on the stairs backstage at Raw Power Festival on Saturday afternoon. Niall, how are you? Yeah, peachy. And what it is that you do? I mess around with video things, basically. I call myself a video artist because it's pretentious and I don't like saying filmmaker because I don't like using film, so I make visuals for bands. How did you get the gig at Raw Power Festival? So, I do visuals for Flamingos. I toured with them last year, we toured around Europe, all around the UK as well. This year we're doing Glastonbury and then Portugal, Italy and a few other places. So, I'll be doing all their stuff. All the visuals of them is tied in with their album artwork and we have like a constant sort of fame. Anyway, their manager is Ant, who put on Raw Power and that's how I got the gig here. So, just to fill in our listeners who aren't aware, who can't see what's going on, the visuals, they incorporate a lot of psychedelic and saturated colour, stock footage and digital glitch sequences. I wonder if you could run us through the process of how you put these visuals together. Yeah, so some of the bands I work with, I tend to use a lot of material that I film myself and then also a lot of stock footage as well. With this festival, it's almost purely stock footage. I'd say about a quarter of it is stuff I film myself. So, what I've got is I've got a laptop, like a sample pad if you like, running for a video mixer, as well as a feedback loop for my camera to make it all sort of mushy, quite sort of low-res, it's all meant to look like a broken TV set. And again, with the colours and the themes of this, I don't want to be using actual symbols and making things too clear because that way you might get into certain bands, you might not want to be associated with certain things. It's all got to be quite loose and just quite colourful. It's like, you know, it's decor. And I come from a background in production design, so sort of art department stuff. So, it's the same thing, it's just adding like atmosphere, colour. You'll see sort of junk stock footage, a few sort of faces and a lot of VHS tapes that I've harvested, which I collected when I was younger. I've used a lot of those as well. So, do you improvise off the fly or did you listen to a few of the bands to get an idea of the theme that you wanted for each performance? I've got a rough idea sort of of what each band sounds like, so I know, you know, sort of how heavy to go with the visuals and, you know, what sort of beat to expect and what sort of movement there's going to be. Only one band actually contacted me and sent over some footage that they wanted me to use for their set. But apart from that, it's all been sort of left up to me. The whole, if you look at the raw power leaflet from sort of an art direction point of view, it's all the colours and all the shapes and colours that I've used are all sort of tied in with that as well, more than the actual bands themselves. That's nice, everything sort of tying in aesthetically. Is there anybody that you're hoping to see, that you're looking forward to seeing this weekend? Yeah, first off, The Cosmic Dead, Flamingos. They promoted a night in Glasgow last year and I was sort of meeting them and I saw them at Dude in the Rabbit Hole. They were really, really good, so I'm looking forward to seeing them again. Earthless as well, I've seen before actually out in Portugal. I'm looking forward to seeing them again. It's been in The Witch, I've never seen before. I think they're playing today, I saw them wandering around earlier, so I'm looking forward to them too. And then one of the guys from Acid Mother's Temple, I can't remember his name, do apologise, but he's playing at some point as well, so I'll definitely be looking forward to checking him out too. And what's next on the radar for you after this festival, after Raw Power? Flamingods are touring, so they're supporting Acid Mother's Temple, Glastonbury coming up, and then a few dates all around Europe. I think the first show is on the 12th of June, so I'm just going to be preparing for that. I've just made a short film as well, so that's going to hopefully get a festival run pretty soon, so I'm in the process of finalising a mix for that on the sound and tweaking that still. Best of luck with all that. Thank you very much.