Christopher Mills for The Acorn

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Curious Pictures’ Christopher Mills brought his lively directorial style to bear on “Flood Pt. 1,” a lively new music video for The Acorn.

As with Christopher’s other projects, the visuals are a mish-mash of media in 2.5D space. The frenetic camera work creates a disorienting effect as we zoom and pitch endlessly through vignette after vignette. It’s not all chaos, though. The music and visuals are remarkably well-matched, and as the video progresses, Mills’ authorial hand becomes more and more evident.

Mills has a knack for texture—not just the visual kind (although that’s there in spades)—but a kind of temporal texture. The way we jump forward and then hover uncertainly on a scene before leaping backwards and lurching into a new setting reminds me the way memory works. We scan our mental landscapes, patching together a narrative from the disembodied images that float and whirl about like debris in a river. It’s messy, but it works somehow.

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