Filming with Dub FX, one of the first YouTube superstars
In 2018 Vita Pictura started VP Meets, a series of short documentaries with inspiring artists and sport athletes, which were connected to our brand. Composer and artist Dub FX was one of our first choices since he has worked for many years with our Italian partner Thomas Pizzinga from Elephant Studio. We just needed to wait until he visited Estonia for yet another sold-out concert. In the end, everything turned into a series of new music videos and the brand new documentary about Dub FX.
Dub FX’s story: at the dawn of the Youtube era
Some of you might remember the beginning of YouTube era, and the very first viral videos that came out of it — Dub FX was one of the first artists to get famous around the world via YouTube; his streets performances have been uploaded to the online platform and then millions of people around the world found out about a street artist who did live performances using a loop pedal and his voice to create new kind of music.
Dub FX’s unique style of semi-improvised street music performances grabbed the first attention in the years 2006–2007. YouTube, that was one of the fastest growing websites at the time, played an essential role in torpedoing Benjamin Stanford’s musical career.
We are not going to re-tell his biography which you may find on Wikipedia, however, you can now watch our band new documentary film with an exclusive interview with the man himself at the end of this story, and of course, find out how it is like to work with such a legend.
The shooting of “Thinking Clear” music video in December 2016
Ben’s use of loop effects is his key signature in his works, and you may still hear this in his more recent works, including “Thinking Clear”, the music video our team of Vita Pictura together with Elephant Studio filmed in the glorious woods of Viru Bog, or Viru Raba in Estonian, one of the most popular nature destinations in Estonia both among tourists and locals. Other shooting locations included Telliskivi Creative district and Pirita-Kose, both located in the capital city of Tallinn.
Before the filming, we published a post on Facebook announcing that we are looking for participants for Dub FX’s new music video. At 1:45 you may see a gang of locals joining Ben — all of them were fans of Dub FX and they were pretty surprised at the opportunity to be filmed with Dub FX:
Series of events leading to the documentary
But how did we get to know Dub FX and how did we decide to film the music video with him, and then to produce the documentary? When Dub FX moved to Europe from Australia, his two bases in Europe became the UK and Italy.
And it was Italy where the events leading to the documentary began.
In 2014, an Italian-based Elephant Studio production company was filming Dub FX during the filming of his Italian tour Theory of Harmony. The tour included such cities as Rome, Bologna, Milan, Turin and Florence.
In fact, Thomas Pizzinga and his production company Elephant Studio, have been touring with Dub FX for quite a long time and filming him on several of his European tours, so only naturally after a while, they became friends.
Later, Thomas found our works online and decided to drop us an email, as Elephant Studio wanted to try working in other parts of Europe and the content we’ve been producing would work well with his own skills in making high-quality videos in the music industry.
He and our co-founder Georgius Misjura first met in Italy, Genoa and decided to start a collaboration on the Weekend Festival production in Finland in 2016. The work went smoothly, both enjoyed the production and filming process, so they decided to continue the collaboration further on future Weekend Festival aftermovies and other projects.
Later that year, in November, Georgius Misjura and executive producer Serj Rimma went to London to film the first-ever Vita Pictura’s music documentary about the German trance music duo Cosmic Gate, where they again met Thomas Pizzinga with Madlene India Sabin from the Elephant Studios, who was filming Dub FX on his UK tour. You can see Thomas’ footage from the 2016 tour between minutes 4 and 6 of our documentary.
When meeting Dub FX in the back stage, we found out that he was planning to visit Estonia; he was excited to see the snow up north and he knew, of course, that he had a lot of fans up north as well.
Dub FX in Estonia
As expected, Dub FX’s Estonian concert got sold out pretty fast. We managed to film many locations on the same day — including the interview with Dub FX in the morning, and then the concert in the evening.
Watch the Vita Pictura crew and Elephant Studios film behind the scenes of “Thinking Clear” in the snowy wonderland:
Two years later, in 2018, we decided to start making a series of short films about Estonian artists and musicians, however, we quickly understood that we do not want to be bound by only one country. Since we had already gotten to know Dub FX during his UK tour and while filming with him the music video in Estonia in 2016, we got in contact with him again, and he agreed to help us make the documentary where he would tell us about his journey to fame and his views on making music.
We did have to wait until August 2019 though, in order to wait until he arrived for yet another scheduled performance in Tallinn on August 25th, 2019 in KultuuriKatel, which was a power plant supplying the city of Tallinn with electricity in the previous century, and now it is one of the main venues for concerts, exhibitions and conferences. The concert was fully sold out yet again.
Watch the full DUB FX | DOCUMENTARY | VP MEETS here:
Our plans:
So far we shot ten VP MEETS series with artists from various backgrounds; for example, with the people behind the craziest parties in Estonia GRIND; a twerk dancer and artist from Finland Tinze, an Estonian hockey player Robert Rooba, and many other real-life colourful characters we can learn something from.
Our production team feels that the VP MEETS series gave us an opportunity to master our documentary filmmaking skills. In fact, when Vita Pictura was founded almost 10 years ago in 2011, our dream was to make films, and we are finally one step closer to that goal.
DUB FX played a great role in torpedoing us towards documentary filmmaking — we were humbled and excited once we found out he agreed to help us in making of DUB FX | DOCUMENTARY | VP MEETS. We still have three more episodes of VP MEETS to share with you in the near future, however it looks like we’ve reached the point where Vita Pictura will be focused on making full length documentary films.
Dub FX’s latest album to date is Roots, released at the beginning of 2020. You can find it on Spotify, Google Play Music and YouTube Music.
His latest project to date is called Branches and you can enjoy it here: https://dubfx.com/branches
Original article written by Roman Pototski
