Conception & Production of music video for Brooke Candy’s track “CUM” featuring Iggy Azaela.

PRODUCTION SELECTS

The video's concept was to explore a transformation in Brooke as she discovered and explored her own sexuality. That exploration occurs within a chatroom environment and features a community of artists, friends and strangers alike going about their own journeys of self-discovery. The online elements served multiple purposes: conceptually, we wanted to explore the degree to which today's technology and the restrictions imposed by COVID-19 pushes people to discover their communities in online spaces. Aesthetically, we wanted to push the iconic 90s looks from Brooke's own childhood. In short it's a very surreal, very Brooke Candy kind of coming of age story.

BROOKE SEQUENCES

I directed the intro sequence featuring Brooke herself and any additional clips she was a part of. These shots posed a particularly invigorating creative challenge as it was important that Brooke’s footage still felt thoughtful and designed even within our “cheap”, found-footage 90s aesthetic. With COVID-19 limiting our ability to build a set or direct lighting and choreography, those iconic moments required a great deal of communication and pre-production and then an extensive VFX workflow after we received footage from Brooke. In the final shots, almost everything you see in Brooke’s room is CGI. A feat that we are technically proud of, but which also unlocked a tremendous amount of freedom to play creatively.

INFLUENCER CONTENT

We had over 60 influencers submit a wide range of content. It was so exciting to see how creative the submissions were and to think through the challenges of aligning look and tone in the edit when dealing with such a spectrum of content and quality of footage. What we found helped the most was to establish a UI context where everything felt as if it was viewed through a web cam or in a chatroom context of some kind. It was a difficult compositing and color task where I worked closely with the graphic designers to develop a range of assets and presets our editors and motion designer could work with to bring this world together.

PROCESS

With a story so extravagant and so much different content received to play with, the ideas were flowing in so many directions. Here are some of the special moments that went into making this video happen, including ideas that didn’t make final cut and still from some of my own cinematography and compositing tests we used to inspired the influencers that submitted.

Production
DE—YAN

Directed by
Dejan Jovanovic & Luke Parker

Producer
Maureen O'Boyle

Creative Direction
Luke Parker

Art Direction
Dejan Jovanovic, Neo Zhang, Luke Parker, John Portis

Edit
Dejan Jovanovic, Sohyun Park

VFX
Luke Parker

Motion Design/Cel Animations
Sohyun Park

Composite/Color
Luke Parker

Graphic Design
Neo Zhang, John Portis

CGI/Production Design
Luke Parker, Stefan Djordjevic