GraffitiStreet

Hi Selina, you are a self taught film director from Sydney, Australia. What age did you become interested in documentary and how did you begin your career in video documentary?

Selina Miles

Hi Graffiti Street! This year will be my 10 year anniversary of my first ever video, which featured Australian graffiti writer Sofles. I started my career doing short clips and music videos, and it wasn’t until about 2 years ago that I really pushed myself to move into a more complex documentary style of video making. I went to Iceland with mural artist Guido van Helten and spent 5 days making a short documentary, which was a really special project and got me inspired to do more. Shortly after that I started working on my first feature documentary which will come out this year.

Guido Van Helten – Iceland Photo © Selina Miles and Guido Van Helten

Guido Van Helten – Iceland Photo © Selina Miles and Guido Van Helten

Guido Van Helten – Iceland Photo © Selina Miles and Guido Van Helten

GraffitiStreet

When did you become interested in capturing the world of urban art?

Selina Miles

Graffiti has been a big part of my creative output since I started. I think that the DIY spirit of many of these artists really motivated me to just pick up a camera and start making stuff. I will always shoot graffiti and street art, it’s an interesting field for me still.

Selina Miles – Behind the scenes of “Limitless” in 2013

GraffitiStreet

The Limitless video from 2013 got you 2 million views in the first 48 hours on Youtube! It's an insane video and the choreography is just as spectacular today as it was when you recorded it 6 years ago. It is a timeless triumph and now exceeds 12 million views to date! How did the video come about and what made you incorporate the "Hyperlapse" technique that everyone still speaks about today?

Selina Miles

I had caught up with a filmmaker friend one day who mentioned this crazy new thing called hyper lapse I had to check out. It was brand new and really made accessible when Adobe Premiere Pro released an effect called the Warp Stabiliser. I guess that info just marinated in my brain but I didn’t think much of it.

A few weeks later I had just landed in Portugal on a graffiti trip with Sofles. One night I was on my laptop and decided to research this technique. I showed Sofles and he was the one who really reacted to it, he was like “dude… we have to do this!.” Luckily, we were in Lisbon which is a city with so many amazing abandoned buildings and tonnes of room to experiment. When we started testing the effect, my first reaction was “holy moly this is so time consuming!” I’m someone who likes technical challenges and my brain really just gelled with this technique and I picked it up pretty easily. The main challenge was the physical element because it was the peak of summer and really, really warm.

About 2 weeks later we had a video completed which we called “Infinite.” It got 700,000 views which for us was totally insane at the time. When we got back to Australia I decided to make another one, with Sofles, Fintan Magee, Treas and Quench – which was Limitless. We worked so hard on it because we were sure there was no way we could top the first one. So we were quite shocked when it got so many views so quickly.

Selina Miles – Behind the scenes of “Limitless” in 2013

Selina Miles – Behind the scenes of “Limitless” in 2013

GraffitiStreet

How did The Limitless video and exposure to such a wide audience within a short space of time shape your career that you enjoy today?

Selina Miles

I think the first day after it went on Reddit I woke up to over 700 emails. They ranged from letters of congratulations or support, to work offers, to just downright crazy abuse from people who hated graffiti. A handful of them resulted in great working relationships that I still have today, particularly with my London based commercial agency MindsEye.

The good thing was that I landed representation in London, Paris and New York shortly after the release of that video and started working on TV ads. The bad thing was that nobody realised I was a complete novice with less than zero experience on a real film set, and it was a very steep learning curve to say the least.

The first video I made after that was a Pepsi online commercial. I was 25, had never gone to film school, and suddenly was responsible for a film crew of 20 or more, and people who were much older than me. I had no idea how to direct anybody, and none of the language of filmmaking. I had no choice but to suck it up and “fake it till I made it.” Looking back I cringe at how clueless I was and how many mistakes I made, how much I got taken advantage of because I was inexperienced. But I’m very grateful for the trust that everyone put in me and for having that opportunity, and having to learn quickly and getting to develop my skills in a real world environment was very lucky for me.

The other thing that quickly became apparent was that this success was going to be short lived unless I worked really hard to break out of the niche as “that girl that did the hyperlapse video.” I have literal hundreds of emails from brands wanting to recreate Limitless for their product, and every single time I explored that idea, I realised it was totally unviable for a bunch of reasons. It was too expensive, too time consuming for any client to go through with. Their ideas were always a bit corny. A lot of creative agencies have this logic of “successful video + your brand = successful campaign” but that’s just not true. And I didn’t want to spend my whole life babysitting a time lapse camera. That really pushed me to work hard to move into new styles and aesthetics for my work.

Selina Miles – On the set of a TV commercial with Mindseye in London in 2016

Selina Miles – On the set of a TV commercial with Mindseye in London in 2016

GraffitiStreet

Given the advances in technology how has your set up changed over the years?

Selina Miles

I think most people go through a phase of being obsessed with gear and thinking “oh if only I could buy X camera then I would be happy with the work I’m making” but over time I’ve realised that the technology is secondary, and it’s the spirit and story and concept of a piece that makes it great, regardless of the tools used. I have a drone, but I don’t really enjoy using it and try to avoid including drone shots of the sake of drone shots. I think at a prosumer level you rarely see drones used well, mostly because they are quite difficult to fly properly. They definitely are handy for shooting giant street art murals though. My favourite purchase is my computer, which cost an absolute arm and a leg but just allows me to edit anything without ever even having to think about things loading or rendering.

Selina Miles

GraffitiStreet

What has been the craziest position you have found yourself in to get "that shot!" ?

Selina Miles

I think the river in Tahiti that was completely infested with giant eels that wriggled around and wrapped around your legs would have been the worst. The water was thigh deep and it took all my energy not to scream and run away the whole time. Later when a friend from Tahiti saw the photos he said “you guys are very brave for going in that water, that’s the most toxic river in Tahiti.” I figured if it’s good enough for the eels it’s good enough for me!

Selina Miles – River in Tahiti

GraffitiStreet

Who/What are your biggest influences; people, movements, styles?

Selina Miles

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Joe Berlinger, Adam McKay, Ed Burtynsky, Rob Whitworth, Broken Fingaz. That’s the ones that I can think of right now!

GraffitiStreet

We enjoyed The Wanderers, a series that focuses on artists worldwide connecting communities with art, and showing the artists personal journey for each project. What did you take from this series and would you be doing another one?

Selina Miles

We are very lucky in Australia to have lots of support for the arts and that series [The Wanderers] was commissioned by the Australian public broadcaster ABC and Screen Australia. I worked with a guy named Drew Macdonald, who produced that series for me even though his real skills are in writing and directing. He taught me so much about storytelling. His advice combined with the mentorship from the heads of programming at the ABC was invaluable. It shifted my thinking from making things that expressed what I wanted to say, to making things that spoke to a specific audience. And it was the first taste of how hard you have to work to make it in the “real world.”

Guido Van Helten, Street Art Freight Carriages, Manildra, Australia 2016. Photo Credit @followthewanderers @selinamiles @bydrewmac @guidovanhelten

Selina Miles – Myla -The Wanderers 2017

Selina Miles – Rone – The Wanderers 2017

GraffitiStreet

Documenting has taken you all around the world, from Iceland to Tahiti! Does any project/place stand out for you and why?

Selina Miles

The most memorable trip recently was to Beirut, Lebanon. I worked with an organisation that does arts workshops with young people in areas of conflict [APTart-Awareness and Prevention Through Art ]. It was humbling, eye opening and inspiring on many levels. It was bitter sweet because I enjoyed the trip so much and met so many amazing people. but I also felt very out of place and powerless to help in a very difficult situation. Lebanon is really struggling to accommodate a huge influx of refugees and still recovering from it’s own civil war. Being there as an Australian person, not able to speak the language, with little cultural understanding made me feel very redundant. It really made me rethink the types of projects I want to devote my time to.

I plan to do more work of this nature but it’s really important to me that artists and filmmakers travel to other cultures with an attitude of humility and sustainability. Rather than make another video in Lebanon, I’d like to go back and work for a Lebanese filmmaker and assist them in telling their own story. I think it’s always good to ask yourself “why am I the right person to tell this story? Is there someone else better suited to it that i can support?”

I really recommend Lebanon as a place to visit. It’s a beautiful country, very safe and people are beyond nice. And the food is delicious.

Selina Miles – Young artists painting for AptArt’s project in Beirut Lebanon 2017

Selina Miles – APTart – Lebanon 2017

Selina Miles – Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp, Beirut, Lebanon 2017

GraffitiStreet

You are currently documenting a full scale movie-length documentary on New York photojournalist Martha Cooper. How did the collaboration come about?

Selina Miles

As with pretty much anyone who grew up around graffiti, I knew about Martha Cooper from her book Subway Art. I met her at a festival in Tahiti, and after a few years of seeing each other and working together there, I asked her if I could make a video about her and she said yes. It was meant to be a 10 minute piece but escalated quickly!

Martha Cooper 2014. Photo by Sally Levin.

GraffitiStreet

We are super excited to watch this movie. What can we expect to see from the Martha Cooper documentary?

Selina Miles

In short, the documentary follows the extraordinary series of events that resulted in Martha becoming quite an unlikely icon of the graffiti subculture. But, it also tells some parts of her life that many graffiti fans don’t know about. It’s a story about what constitutes success, and how we wrangle our ideas of success over our lifetime.

Martha Cooper – Photo Selina Miles

GraffitiStreet

What has been your best experience hanging out with the legendary Martha cooper, and what has been the most challenging aspect covering her five decade career?

Selina Miles

It’s all so much fun, there’s never a dull moment hanging with Marty. She’s been so generous with her time and trusted me with her story and archives. I’m extremely lucky to be able to tell her story. The biggest challenge has been deciding which bits to include, because she has done so much that it’s just impossible to include everything.

Selina Miles – Selina Miles working on story cards for the Martha Cooper documentary

GraffitiStreet

The International Women's Day 2019 campaign theme of #BalanceforBetter is a call-to-action for driving gender balance across the world. Do you find there is a balance of gender within the documentary industry?

Selina Miles

I am very proud to have a 60% female crew on the Martha Cooper documentary, all the way through from development to post. It is well documented that there remains a significant imbalance of gender across the documentary industry, and filmmaking in general. The film industry still has a lot of work to do before we can say that there is true gender balance, especially amongst directors.

There’s a vicious cycle that exists especially in ads, where a female director is considered “high risk,” or “the wild card,” and so doesn’t get as many opportunities to get work on her reel. It’s hard to become a “reliable” or “safe” of “established” director without that work on the reel, and so the cycle continues. It’s often said that male directors are hired on their potential, where female directors are only ever hired on their proven prior success.

There are some great initiatives working hard to address these issues, particularly Free the Bid which is a non-profit fighting for female directors in the commercial industry.

Selina Miles – With Myla, bottom behind the scenes of The Wanderers 2017

GraffitiStreet

As a strong female figure within the documentary/ urban art scene, have you got any advice for others who wish to follow their passion?

Selina Miles

Go out there and get it! Have fun, and don’t let anyone tell you you can’t do something. Find your own voice and be different to everyone else. And always be good to your crew and pay everyone as well as you can.

Selina Miles – Little camera setup in Dubai, 2013