The brief

When Jaye approached us to make a music video for his soon-to-release track, we were in Australia at the time. We had some back and fourth online but saved any kind of real creative conversations until we were able to meet in person a couple of weeks later. However, this didn't stop us from getting started on some previs that would help us communicate and problem-solve some techincal shots in advance.

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When we did meet, he said that a big reason he reached out to us in the first place was our already somewhat established visual style, and more or less wanted to see what ideas we had after listening to his song.

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concept

standalone, the song is predominantly a love song, however, Ayu (our director) came up with something that aligned a bit more with what we're usually known for, landing on a horror/liminal inspired short film with romantic elements throughout. While several elements of the story developed/changed over the course of the pre-production, one thing stayed consistent, capturing the feeling of chasing something and never really quite reaching it.

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challenges

While the groundwork for the story was being rendered, we also had the challenge of finding locations that were within scope, required minimal art direction and fit the liminal vibe that was trying to be achieved. This resulted in a 3 day location scout sprint that saw us driving all corners of Singapore, dozens of emails, write-ins and calls trying to see what was available.

Fortunately, due to the interesting nature of Singapore's rapid urban development, there are definitely a handful of locations that most would deem 'liminal' that are hiding in plain sight.

at this point, we did have a very solid general idea for the story but hadn't gone so far as to have a complete shotlist/storyboard. This wasn't unintentional.

rather than trying to brute-force ideas into reality, using real-world constraints to guide the creative process can lead to problem-solving that elevates core concepts we already have.

an example of this in the context of this project was figuring out how to transition between the spaces we had available to us.

In a perfect world, we would have had the time, budget and permission to build a practical prop like a door to allow us to pass from one space to another, likely ending up on pretty generic match-cut style transitions.

However, due to constraints we had to do said elements fully in CGi. this allowed for some much more ambitious portal-style effects that we would have been unlikely to explore had we been allocated more resources to do the same thing practically.

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production

fortunately, we captured some bts of the production because if we had to write it all out it'd be mostly a blur.

post-production

while there was a lot of problem-solving that needed to be done it post, none of it came as an surprise as we had accounted for much of the VFX on location, and was mostly a matter of just making it happen. Much of the post work that was required was mainly pretty traditional VFX, object removal, 3d, compositing and some additional enhancements building on the practical elements that we had.

The turnaround for the post-production ended up being roughly a 1-month cycle. Pretty much every shot in the music video has had some kind of work done on it to enhance the liminality (it's a real word, we checked.) of the locations.

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delivery

from the very beginning of the project, Jaye knew he wanted the video optimised for social media, specifcially Instagram & TikTok.

While we've worked on plenty of social media deliverables, as well as plenty of music videos, this would be the first time we were creating a music video with hyper-focused targeting for social media.

One of the challenges this presented was how to keep a cinematic quality to the video whilst delivering in a 9:16 format.

One of the ways we addressed this was shooting the music video with a vertical vintage anamoprhic lens setup, which created lens artifacts that spanned the screen vertically, rather than horizontally, to make the vertical format feel intentional, not an afterthought.

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If the first place you saw the music video was on social media, then you'd know that it was split up into a three part mini-series rather than one continuous video.

This was done mostly as a way to natively optimise the video, but also partially just as a way to experiment and try something new.

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we also put together some promo material leading up to the release of the main music video, included in this was a short visual that used some footage that didn't make the final cut for the actual music video:

summary

We had a great time working on this music video and are very grateful for Jaye giving us the creative freedom to take the music video in a direction that felt familiar to us, which led us to push ourselves and create some great opportunities for innovation.

We look forward to seeing what comes next of Jaye's cinematic universe.

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