Lil Chief Alumni Video Director Releases Film

This month sees the launch of the film "How Far is Heaven" by the director, Chris Pryor. We here at Lil Chief wanted to pass on our congratulations to Chris since he was one of the earliest directors to work with some of the bands on Lil Chief Records and was especially helpful in the days when we absolutely zero budget for music videos.
.
His first effort was the video for "Bedroom Exotica" by the Tokey Tones. It was a fairly crazy track to choose as a single, but the music was a perfect accompaniment to his super-eight images of the Warkworth rodeo. Warkworth certainly isn't Texas, but this small-town in New Zealand certainly does it's best to get it's cowboy on ... at least, during rodeo season. Amazingly the video was shown on television repeated times and gained the Tokey Tones a reputation for being a band who valued artistic merit over pop stardom...



Chris was also a great help during the creation of the first video for the Ruby Suns, "Sleep In The Garden". Now he shouldn't take the blame for the crazy idea behind the video - it was my own foolish idea to film all of us in the band throwing vegetables at lead singer, Ryan McPhun, while he tried to mime his way through the song. And I think we can firmly blame the little dance routines on James Milne, who was caught up in the bizarreness of the concept and decided we should take it even further. Of course, it was too much for Ryan, who kept breaking into laughter as tomatoes continually hit him in the face. The footage ended up being fairly unusable, so I had the bright idea that we could dump the whole lot on Chris and see what he could come up with. His odd editing choices turned our craziness into something that's actually pretty entertaining to watch.

Things to note - the guitar that Ryan is playing was signed by two members of Bon Jovi. It was later painted black and smashed in half during a show by the Conjurors. And doesn't this song sound great, even after five years have passed since its first release...





Chris's movie is a beautifully shot documentary that looks at a group of nuns that live in small town New Zealand. They continue to live in a traditional fashion, whilst also having to deal with the impositions of the outside world and the wildly varying culture of the largely Maori population that lives nearby. To find out where Chris's film is showing then follow this link.