Back 2 Love

INCITING INCIDENT

In early 2021, at the height of the pandemic, our old friends Eli and Charlie of Soul Clap reached out with an exciting new project.

Soul Clap’s new LP “WTF” (World Transformational Force) is a concept album that takes place in a world suffering through a climate apocalypse and deals with the arrival of a mysterious intergalactic force that turns things around by replanting the seeds of art, love, and inspiration.

Back 2 Love would be the first single off of the album and needed a music video that would help set the tone and articulate this core idea of humanity finding its way through catastrophe with art.

In early 2021, at the height of the pandemic, our old friends Eli and Charlie of Soul Clap reached out with an exciting new project.

Creative

This project marks our 5th collaboration with Soul Clap so over the years we’ve developed a lot of shared references and creative shorthand.

One reference we kept coming back to for this project was the video or Sigur Ròs’ “Vaka” in which a group of gas-masked school kids play merrily against the backdrop of a soot-covered nuclear disaster.

In the first few minutes of our kick-off zoom call (remember…covid days), we were honing in on a concept: two dancers, wearing gas masks (thank you Sigur Ros), would make their way above ground and toward each other across a post-apocalyptic hellscape, ultimately finding each other and celebrating a human connection amidst the ashes of their dying world.

We’d be fairly limited on budget and there would be no way to actually create even the smallest patch of post-apocalyptic hellscape, so we had to rely on….

Location, Location, Location

We’re pretty sure it was EP (back then, just plain old Producer) Pedro Brehm who had the idea to “just shoot everything against a brutalist backdrop…feels “apocalyptic-y.”

Boom…dancers in front of a brutalist backdrop…felt “apocalyptic-y” enough to put it in the treatment.

Our original thought was to shoot half of the video in Yonkers and half in CDMX, both of which have an abundance of brutalist architecture (and conveniently where our offices are based), but quickly realized that because of budget constraints and a great stroke of inspiration, generosity, and luck, we’d shoot exclusively in CDMX…

Bailadores

Early in the process, Jero had reached out to friends and collaborators Ana Elisa Mena and Roberto Rodriguez… and, boy, did they answer the call.

Ana Elisa, the Prima Ballerina of the National Mexican Dance Company, and her husband Roberto, a top Latin American dancer himself, happily graced the project with their talent, energy, and art.​

Ana Elisa and Roberto were absolutely brilliant to say nothing of the handicap of a 5lb gas mask and coveralls weighing things down.