Overview

For this stunningly dreamy spec music video for the band Gorgon City, I did Art direction and photography. Together with the director Lucy Leigh-Pemberton, we created the characters and costumes that remind of Shakespeare’s A Midnight Summer’s Dream with fairies and elves. The most exciting part of the project was creating characters that look distinct from each other and yet together form a harmonious magic visual narrative. The most challenging part was during the shoot itself - managing hair stylists, make up artists, and set designers.

Branding Concept

Gorgon City is an English electronic music music band consisting of two North London producers Kye "Foamo" Gibbon and Matt "RackNRuin". I knew the director, Lucy, from the Juicy Couture commercial shoot, and she asked me if I would be interested in being an Art Director for the music video - a song Imagination - she wanted to pitch to Gorgon City. Lucy was from England and she knew the band.

The music video had to reflect Gorgon city’s brand identity, there was no doubt. Kye and Matt noted in one of the interviews that they wanted a unique and a random name. It also has couple references, one of which is a mythical place, a fantasy island.

Also, Imagination was from the Gorgon City’s album Sirens, released in 2014. The album artwork contained an image of a gorgon, a mythical creature from the Greek mythology known for the legendary gaze that could turn one into stone.

Character creation

The plot was simple. The main character, the Imaginer, falls asleep while playing a piano, to be taken to the Gorgon City, an ideal place with beauty, harmony, and dancing mythical creatures. Surrounded and guided by the welcoming creatures, the Imaginer finds his true love, the Gorgon Girl. Then he wakes up.

When Lucy and I started talking about the project, she had 8 characters in mind in the mood board. We needed more to build a scene, so I started brainstorming ideas around mythical creatures, white body paint mimicking statues, and gold colors also taken from the Greeks. I stared off with a mood board - the pictures below are from my Pinterest board.

After brainstorming some ideas, we added six more characters. After this for each character we created a separate board that listed more details about the look, along with the materials we need to buy to create it. Two of the character boards are displayed below.

Together with Lucy, we created costumes for the characters, planned hair styling and make- up. I managed a team of about 10 people, including hair stylists, make up artists, photographers, and set designers.

Art Direction

We filmed for two days in two locations, including Palace of Fine Arts and a small dancing studio in San Francisco with tons of white flour. I was art directing the shoot, helped with the set design and was one of the onset photographers. The main character, the Imaginer, was played by an English model Harvey Newton Haydon who flew from England just for the weekend. It was an interesting project with a great team, and I think the video turned out to be amazing.