Meilyr Jones, former frontman of Race Horses, is releasing his first solo album shortly, and How To Recognise A Work Of Art is a characterically kooky but charming offering from that record - and now has a music video to match, a one-shot wonder directed by National Theatre director Wils Wilson, and shot by Ryan Owen Eddleston. 

The video is an ode to Fellini's 8½, and works like a walking dream through Jones's mind (who produced it himself, and recruited lots of friends to help him make the video). It starts with his song being mimed by an actor (Hugh Skinner from W1A and Poldark) who's soon killed off, when Jones is roped in as his understudy, walking through a series of strange scenes on set, encountering sycophantic art dealers, a Kurt Cobain impersonator (also played by Skinner) and a vision of the three muses before finally becoming a dictatorial emperor figure, who has his portrait painted... 

"I love getting people together," says Meilyr (above). "My grandmother was an amateur theatre director and I loved going to watch her rehearsing plays in the evenings when I was a boy. You'd see people from the town making the costumes, and singing, my granddad would have designed the set, and the spirit of the whole thing was great. We worked with a group of 12 actors, and over a period of four days, transformed a warehouse in Cardiff from scratch to a film set, building and painting the sets."

After days of prep and rehearsals, Ryan Eddleston, having suggested the idea of a single long take around the set, captured the action on an Arri Alexa Mini, stabilised with a MoVi M15 stabiliser and shot with vintage Zeiss Super Speed lenses.

"I knew we could achieve this on the MoVi - a similar beast to the steadicam," says Ryan. "I referenced a video by the band Phoenix, and Meilyr talked about Gurney Slade, the way being behind the scenes and being in the scene was quite seamless, and we tried to do that at the very start, and in-between scenes.

"I remember about three quarters through the take, thinking I haven’t messed anything up yet, and being full of adrenaline for the last sequence. It was 8:15pm and we were supposed to wrap at 8pm, so not bad going as we’d spent three days making the video. We were all huddled around a monitor watching playback on the last take and everybody was overjoyed."