MUMBAI: Derek Vincent Smith, popularly known under his stage name- Pretty Lights, plans to venture into creating a “cinematic experience” for his followers, he revealed to Radioandmusic.com. The ‘Finally Moving’ hitmaker mentioned that one of his upcoming projects include him “simultaneously expanding into film-making.” Smith is currently in India as a part of his ‘Illumination Tour 2015’, and is scheduled to perform country-wide through LIVE Viacom18’s Vh1 Supersonic Arcade and Pepsi MTV Indies’ Spiro.
“It is almost like trying to produce and edit not just visuals, but movies into cinematic storytelling,” Smith told Radioandmusic.com’s Aashay Dalvi. “It will be an improvisation to the music with a strong cinematic visual element, which exponentially multiplies the possibilities of what a song experience can be,” he added.
Related Post
When asked how he got into film-making, Smith said, “I originally got into film-making by just pointing the camera in my hand to things that I thought were beautiful. I did not know what that was called at the time; I was just a kid with a camera. That led me to major in Film and Philosophy when I went to university. But I decided to pursue music, because at that time, I was spending most of my time on it anyway.”
Speaking about his film-making influences he said, “My film-making influences are always growing and expanding, and it is only now that I can reference directors and directors of photography.” He added that the film-maker who recently caught his attention is the two-time Alfred P. Sloan Prize winning director Mike Cahill. In addition to Cahill, Smith also mentioned the French directing duo Fleur et Manu, who are well known for directing the M83 music video trilogy, which started with ‘Midnight City’, followed by ‘Reunion’ and concluded with ‘Wait’.
Early last year, Pretty Lights released the album ‘A Colour Map of the Sun’, which was followed by the EP ‘The Hidden Shades’. While all the other Pretty Lights records have been released under its own label- Pretty Lights Music, ‘A Colour Map of the Sun’ has been released under its second subsidiary label called ‘8 Minutes 20 Seconds Records’. “Since ‘A Colour Map of the Sun’ was a very different project and was created in a different way, I wanted to have it legally separate from the works of Pretty Lights Music,” said Smith. “8 Minutes 20 Seconds is how long it takes for the light of the sun to reach the earth. I found that to be really cool,” he added.
The Grammy Award nominated electronic music producer also said that along with film-making, he is currently working on multiple projects, all leading up to the release of his upcoming album. Smith premiered some of the raw material of his upcoming record, which he calls his “best work yet” at the interactive session conducted at True School of Music. “I want to change the regular album-tour-album-tour cycle. Therefore, as I work on the new album, I am also finishing up a record I did with a live band I tour with called Analog Future. In addition to that, I am also working on a few singles, one of them I mentioned in the session is ‘Bombay Bump’, which will soon be released,” he added.
