IAMWARFACE - Closer

Artist: IAMWARFACE
Track: Closer
Production Company: Kumo London 
Director/Cinematography: Yohan Forbes
Featured Talent: Simona Martini & Matt Warneford
Writer/Assistant Director/Executive Producer: Matt Warneford
Camera Assistant: Charlie Charman
Edited by: Yohan Forbes & Tom Howe (Visual Effects)

Closer is a monochrome dance-drama that merges romanticism and spectral energy, exploring memory, loss, and creative resurrection.

With direction and cinematography by Yohan Forbes of Kumo London, the film follows Simona Martini, an ex-ballerina turned actress, embodying a lone figure drifting through an abandoned Brighton shipyard a siren mourning the ruins of a vanished world.

Filmed entirely on a Sony FX5 mounted on a Ronin stabiliser, paired with soft-focus Olympus OM lenses, the visuals evoke the aesthetic of decayed cinema grain, haze, and silver light shaping a timeless atmosphere.

Matt Warneford, IAMWARFACE’s front-man, developed the concept, soundtrack, and emotional arc. His collaboration with Forbes continued the creative partnership established in Fear The Future, extending the band’s cinematic language into new terrain where movement becomes emotion and silence becomes score.

STRATEGIC INSIGHT

This project marked Kumo London’s second collaboration with IAMWARFACE, reinforcing the studio’s ability to navigate between music, performance, and narrative film.

Forbes’ approach balancing choreography, location storytelling and vintage optics demonstrates how cinematic authorship can thrive within independent music production.

It also reflects Kumo’s Collaborative Code: where directors, musicians, and performers co-create with mutual respect and authorship, allowing each discipline to inform the other’s emotional truth.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Closer captures how art can transform industrial decay into poetry. By blending experimental cinematography with live performance, the film reclaims the power of stillness and gesture within modern music video culture.

It affirms Kumo London’s philosophy that authorship and empathy are cinematic currencies that small, independently crafted stories can resonate with the emotional depth of feature film work

SERVICES DELIVERED

- Direction & Cinematography (Sony FX5 / Ronin kit/ OM-10 prime lens kit)

- Concept development with Matt Warneford

- On-set camera operation and lighting design

- Narrative editing and VFX integration with Tom Howe

- Location management and production coordination in Brighton

RELATED WORKS

- IAMWARFACE - Fear The Future: Genre-driven horror music video exploring identity and isolation.

- Aurora Dee Raynes - Crazy That You Love: Conceptual music video for Tru Thoughts label.

- Ella Henderson - Acoustic Sessions: Performance-based storytelling for Warner Music UK.

At Kumo London, we treat every collaboration as a dialogue between form and feeling. Filmed on Brighton’s tidal flats, Closer stands as a meditation on remembrance and renews a bridge between music video and short film. Through movement, monochrome light, and human connection, it reminds us that even decay can be cinematic when told with empathy and truth.