Ewan Jones Morris has 12 Vimeo Staff Picks, half a UK Music Video Award, a BAFTA Cymru and no idea what to do with any of them. His words, not ours. The Welsh filmmaker, animator and director works across music videos, short films, commercials, live visuals and theatre, blending live action with animation, collage and archive material into something that defies easy description but is immediately recognisable: meticulously made, quietly funny and deeply strange in the best possible way. He has directed music videos for Anna Meredith, DJ Shadow, Leftfield, John Grant, The Human League, Cate Le Bon and Lemaitre, whose Closer clocked 78 million YouTube views. Most recently he collaborated with Partizan director Camille Boumans on a lyric video for The Rolling Stones. His collaborations with artist Bedwyr Williams have been exhibited at the Barbican, Glasgow International Arts Festival and the Vienna Biennale. He’s also a regular fixture on Adam Buxton’s BUG show at the BFI. Commercial clients include Marmite, Hyundai and Cadbury’s, which tells you something about his range.
Tuggemo means swarm. What Jones Morris brings to Kinomural earns the name: an evolving, hypnotic animation of growth, insects, disco bugs and spores, a stylised vision of the natural world set to music by Anna Meredith, performed by the Ligeti Quartet. It’s the first release from their collaboration, taken from the album Nuc. There are plenty of creepy crawlies here, and Jones Morris folded AI into his own handmade process to make them: “I created images, then fed them into AI which gave me variations, and then used those images to animate,” he says.
