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| Styx’ new DVD includes a music video by Steve Jones and Ken Hale |
A DVD by rock legends Styx, just released by Sanctuary Music, features a new music video by local director/producer Steven A. Jones.
To create the video, Jones reunited with Ken Hale of What the Hale Music, with whom he composed the soundtrack for the classic thriller, “Henry: Portrait of Serial Killer,” back in the ?80s.
“The Styx song, ?Yes I Can,’ is a love ballad about a person imagining his love in her garden,” Jones said. “We created a psychedelic Victorian postcard. We shot a lot of digital footage at the Botanic Garden, we shot the band on green screen, and we created a lot of flowers and flowering effects and layers and composited it all together.”
Jones directed and designed the rear projection system for Styx’ summer tour with Journey and REO Speedwagon. He directed the effects-heavy video on the big 30×15-foot screen that played behind the band on tour last summer. “When we completed that, they asked me to do the video,” he said. .
Hale was visual effects supervisor. Editor was Ron Stanley. Jones and Styx’ James Young have known each other since they were students at design school. A musician ? he plays drums ? Jones belonged to rock ?n’ roll bands. He also wrote the lyrics for Young’s solo album, “Sitting on Top of the World.”
Jones is best known as the producer of director John McNaughton films. Besides “Henry,” with Michael Rooker and produced for $100,000, they include “The Borrower,” with Rae Dawn Chong, and “Wild Thing,” with Matt Dillon, Kevin Bacon and Neve Campbell.
He was also one of the producers on “Mad Dog and Glory,” with Robert De Niro, Bill Murray and Uma Thurman filmed in Chicago in 1991. .
“The intention of our company, McNaughton/Jones Motion Pictures, was that we would both direct, but I haven’t gotten the opportunity,” Jones said. “So now I have various projects of my own that I’m trying to get moving with myself as director” through his own Owen Films.
“Over the last two years as the feature business slowed down all over the country and died here altogether, I started doing some screenwriting,” Jones said. “I figured I could hire myself as director.”
As for the future of features being made in Chicago, he said he is “cautiously optimistic.”
Reach Jones at 773/929-4173 or stevenajones@sbcglobal.net. See whatthehalemusic.com.-? by Ed M. Koziarski, edk@homesickblues.com
