Role: Director, Designer & Animator
Client: Milky Chance/ Ansatz Music/ Muggelig Records GMBH
Milky Chance is a Berlin based music group with an international following and fanbase. To build anticipation for their new album they planned on re-releasing some of their more popular songs paired with a new lyric videos for each one. Eight artists were hand picked and I was very fortunate to have been one of them. I chose the song 'Blossom' from a short list the group presented to me. You can read more about my process and why I chose this song bellow in the written portion of the video, which you can also find in the videos description.
This is the official lyric video for "Blossom" from the 2017 album "Blossom" by Milky Chance. The video was created by John Moraskie, a filmmaker and animator from Mexico and Puerto Rico, who is based in Brooklyn, NY.
"When Milky Chance and their team reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in making a video for one of their songs I said yes immediately because of two reasons. First, because I love music. Second, because I vividly remember the summer that Milky Chance released their song ‘Stolen Dance’ I still didn't have my driver’s license. However, my older brother did and all summer he would drive me around and play ‘Stolen Dance’ on a loop. So in short, I would get to work with something I love and also impress my older brother. Sign me up. I chose the song ‘Blossom’ from a shortlist they sent me because it sounded so different to me and stood out from the rest of the songs. In my case ‘Stolen Dance’ might have been an obvious choice, but I thought that would be TOO obvious. I listened to the song intently, trying to conjure imagery in my head that matched the mood and feeling of the song. I read the lyrics over and over again, taking them apart in order to find their meaning.
What I concluded was that the song ‘Blossom’, to me, is someone singing about their disillusion. How they feel the pointlessness in existence and also the pointlessness in their point of view. How they know that things should change but also know things will never change. However, the only thing that can change this is if the speaker sees a change in the world, or more specifically in us, the audience. The singer wants to see us blossom, to change for the better, to evolve.
After I landed on that the video seemed to put itself together. First and foremost I thought there needed to be a flower involved. You just can't have a song called ‘Blossom’ and not have a flower. The larger part of the video takes place in a car. I already had a personal connection to the image of a car thanks to my older brother, but it worked well here in the sense that a car is something that changes your world quite literally. It takes you from one place to another. I then placed it in a monotonous repetitive landscape to mirror the sentiment about lack of change. One thing I had to think hard about was words. As a filmmaker I primarily work with images and I’m not used to having to share the frame with text, but in a lyric video the text is the most important part! So I had to think of how and what is the best way to optimally pair image and text and the answer was hiding in plain sight on my bookshelf. Comics! By borrowing the concept of the panel I was able to create a self contained image that worked well on its own and left the rest of the frame free for the lyrics to live in, a frame within a frame.
In the end, I’m very happy with the way the video came together and truly think that they complement one another. A perfect pairing. Just like summer and long car rides."
