Papaya Films director Brent Bonacorso recently working with Canadian Art Pop titan Grimes for her new music video for ‘You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around’
Early this year Grimes released the official music video for 'You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around’ with a green screen background the premise being her fans could interact with it, like a collective piece of artwork. Brent is a long time fine of the Canadian artist, so he happily jumped at the chance to be able to work with her.
Here’s what Brent had to say
At the beginning of quarantine in the US, Grimes released a video of her new song entirely on green screen, while also releasing a link to the high resolution footage, with the idea that anyone could complete the video as they saw fit. I thought it was a brilliant idea, a way to involve her fans in making an interactive collective artwork that anyone across the world could take part in (given a certain amount of post-production knowledge). We were all beginning to huddle indoors, with people taking up jigsaw puzzles and learning how to bake bread, and as a longtime fan of hers I figured this project would be a fun way for me to keep busy during those quiet times.
Brent continues:
Work on it was… not incredibly exciting. A lot of heavy visual effects work went into it, which simply amounts to a lot of hours at the computer and a lot of late nights. The footage was a bit rough, and needed quite a bit of love to integrate it into the worlds I was creating, but it’s a satisfying process when an imagined idea becomes a living, breathing thing onscreen. Of course, as I created the entire film myself in my home studio with, it was all a rather slow and steady process.
I like to allow a film to evolve as it’s being created, to become what it wants to become. For this particular film, I had a clear idea of what I wanted it to be going in, but like all living things it began to take it’s own path. Grimes shot the video at the end of her pregnancy, and actually gave birth to her son during the making of the film. So the initial themes of technology, myth, conception and creation evolved, the film ultimately taking on the form of a sort of birth announcement for little X Æ A-12 (the name of her child).
Brent’s thoughts on Grimes
Grimes is obviously a visitor to our world, summoned from the cosmos to join us here and give us her brilliant music. We Earthlings are eternally grateful.
To see more of Brent’s work click here: Papaya Films