Brock Neal Roberts's new video for Sam Fender - his second for the South Shields singer-songwriter, after last year's MVA-nominated video for Seventeen Going Under - elevates an everyday story of teenage friendship with a clever visual device. 

In the video for Getting Started, we see four friends work their way down their tower block, picking each other up on the way as they prepare to head for a night out. And each stage is mainly presented as a three dimensional photo, the camera tracking through the boys as they are caught static, in the moment.

Brock has mainly used in-camera effects to create this sense of hyperreality, with the young actors freezing their bodies in a physical way rather than achieving the effect in post-production - identical twins were used to play the same characters, to bring the complex blocking to life.  Imaginative art direction assists to make this work, such as the spray of a deodorant can and smoke from a cigarette created with cotton wool.

Sam Fender's performance is the final piece of the jigsaw, walking through the same night-time streets, the unseen narrator of the boys' lives. In the Director's Cut we are featuring here, he is slightly more incidental to the action than in the official release. Ultimately, it is a charming and positive representation of youth and young male friendship.