Jon Miner dug into his archives for the Mogwai’s “Ceiling Granny” video

The filmmaker behind the Emerica videos uses Super-8 and 16mm film shot from 1995–2010 for the video.

Jon Miner’s use of lo-fi film stocks was a huge part of his productions for skate shoe company Emerica. I’m sure that I’m not the only person who thinks of the grainy, green-tinted footage of skaters pushing from the Stay Gold B-Sides series when they think of the brand. Miner (along with early collaborator Mike Manzoori) got the gig to do Emerica’s first video This is Skateboarding because they made Come Together (1995, ATM Click) which I swear I saw Andrew Reynolds describe as “the best video ever.” “Come Together” is a heavily collaged effort that effortlessly moves back and forth between mostly video of skating and film of wandering roadways, moments between tricks and informal portraits act as a kind of documentation of the world the team inhabits. It’s a worthy successor to projects like Alien Workshop’s Memory Screen and A Visual Sound by Stereo: traditional skate videos packaged inside a larger picture about how someone sees the world. “Come Together” is about moments.

Miner went back to those moments and combed through 15 years of lo-fi film snapshots and time-lapse experiments to produce Mogwai’s “Ceiling Granny” compiling it into a loose abstract narrative about travel, density and, um, talking cars.

It also just occurred to me that this is not the first time I’ve written about Jon Miner’s work…

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