Personal Filmmaking and Spectacle in a Music Video: A Director’s Essay.

When I first was approached to take on “Moving Out” as a project to direct, I was equal parts intrigued and apprehensive. Having been involved in many music videos, I didn’t want to repeat myself visually, nor was I interested in shooting a straight forward performance video. A lot of my previous work skews towards the lurid, having always had a fascination and penchant towards darker themes.  At the time, I was going through a very personal, intense period in my life. I was watching someone I loved in pain, and consequently I was experiencing a deep pain myself. I emerged through this darkness in my life with a newly profound understanding of beauty and love. This very personal breakthrough, coupled with not wanting to professionally repeat myself, led me to the decision to create something bright and beautiful.

Cassandra’s song “Moving Out” spoke to me on an instinctual level, and I immediately felt I could do the song justice by not only addressing the song’s themes, but connecting them with my own personal experiences. And so I set forth with a specific, epic vision in my mind, one bursting with luminous visuals but telling a quite simplistic tale of love lost and found. My idea was to tell the story of a girl’s journey through her own head, represented by an art gallery whose paintings all reveal and bring to life her the depths of her subconscious: inner fears, neurosis, and memories. The different styles and selections of artwork depict the various facets of her mind, where colors and textures clash and meld to lead her on through her trek. I wanted this to be cinematic, magical, and a love letter to creativity and exploration of our universal need for love and connection. An enormous amount of time, energy, and thought were needed to execute what I envisioned in my mind’s eye. As a cinephile and admirer of many prolific directors, I’ve sought many great works to learn, from my formative years to the present. From David Fincher and Mark Romanek, to Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, the creative stamp and ambition they each implemented into their music videos was brilliant and rare. Their inspiration stays with me to this day and helped me in my quest to create something unique of my own.

Dating back to the birth of silent cinema, the daring work and flair of George Melies and the other masters were, essentially, music videos: moving images set to live music. From The Lumiere Brothers’ pianist performing live to their first public screenings in 1895, to film companies promotions of Elvis and The Beatles in the 50’s and 60’s, to the birth of MTV on August 1, 1981. Music, moving imagery, and storytelling have been married from the beginning.

Music intertwined with cinematic storytelling is a greatly rich tradition I wanted to embark upon. In order to take that journey, I’d need an army of daring cohorts willing to take a leap in the name of  creative exploration; artists willing to push their skill sets both creatively and technically. So with a rag tag team of innovators and craftsmen/women, we set out to climb Mount Everest with little resources other than a willingness to make something of which we could be artistically proud.

Achieving this feat required, among many challenges, the creation of different worlds each with their own aesthetic styles. Each world stands for a different state of her past which still lingers in her present. The more she tries to break free or her former self, the more she is confronted with her former failures in love. I based this struggle off the lyrics in the song, dealing with the battle to follow her heart instead of her head. I wanted the band members to be married to a section of the art gallery representing the memories of her relationships with them. Bassist Sean Chapman was the first love–young, crazy, and passionate. The work of Jackson Pollock with the volcanic paint still forming and coming to life instinctually felt right and visually interesting to set us off in the journey. The drummer, Chris Mayrena, was in line with the photographic work of Ansel Adams, and the impressionistic work of Claude Monet. He represented a dark and toxic relationship; someone whom she should never have been with but could also not break free. Guitarist David DeMuth was the last and most heartbreaking relationship from her past. Losing this love was true heartbreak and for that I harkened to a Cubist approach, drawing inspiration from the works of Pablo Picasso and George Braque, among others. The shattered cubist imagery mirrors her own broken heart. And finally, the creature. This character acts as her rabbit down the hole, taunting her and leading her on the journey to face herself. Since the piece was already so visual fx heavy, I wanted the creature to be practical and more in line with my nostalgic love of the work of Jim Henson. I worked with creature designer Dan Hauck to bring to life one of my childhood fantasies, in turn bringing something magical yet organic and raw to the piece.

In the end, I can say my team at Guerilla Wanderers and I are very proud of this work. No one person makes a film on his/her own, it’s the love and passion of a group of people working together to create. I am truly honored that so many people contributed their talents to bring my vision to life. If you want enjoy it as a fun, vibrant spectacle, it’s there in the form of a visual treat for the eyes. If you want to search for deeper, hidden meaning behind the images, you can find that too. The work is meant to be appreciated in anyway the viewer chooses, as my intention is to entertain as much as to explore the nature of our constant search and need to hold onto the ever mysterious, elusive feeling called love.