Los Angeles based music collective Local Strangers approached me to design and produce a lyrics video for their single "De Ti". I worked closely with their lead vocalist, Sam Ramirez, who lead the creative direction for this project.
Challenge
The single is inspired by lead singer, Sam Ramirez’s grandparents relationship, and “how scary and risky a commitment like love can be… the idea that it can work, which it often feels like is an impossibility in this world.” We needed to create a video that could stand out amingst the many lyrics videos populating Youtube, as well as create a video that could be converted to social media for promotion of the single.
Sam wanted me to capture that syrupy, warm and hazey feeling a deep romatic connection can bring. He also wanted the video to have a hallucinogenic sort of feel to it, capturing the ephemeral almost intagible sort of feeling love can bring.
Solution
In order to develop the visual approach for the video, I took inspiration from some of the keywords Sam gave me, alongside mixing in different visual tropes inspired by his moodboard. A big aspect of the moodboard was having a vintage, handheld camera sort of vibe, so I developed some visual treatments to apply universaly accross the video (heavy grain, paired with subtle glitch distortions to the text, and a custom film scratch texture).
In terms of placing the video in an ephemeral time space, I shot videos of flowers in my neighborhood, and edited them to be heavily abstracted versions of the original subject matter.
These are stills from the untreated videos I filmed to use as backplates for the video.
De Ti moodboard
