Raafi Rivero, director: "One image I couldn't shake after talking to the label about this video was a radial saw blade. The words 'hard' and 'toug'” kept coming up, and the artist, Styles P, has a strong street presence. For the treatment I took photos of nails and a pile of rusty saw blades and put them ahead of the reference materials. There was always going to be a street element to this video, so the visual of a saw works because it's something that's both tough in the literal sense, but also highly graphic. The beat also has a horror-movie quality. Creating the narrative portion was all about putting the characters in situations where their anger and fear would bubble over without going into parody. The treatment was a simple story of uncompromising street life where the threat of violence hangs over everything. Styles gave the raw energy in his performance to counter-balance the emotions we see from the characters. Tying everything together were the locations, as shadowy and deep as we could find." --> watch "Araab Styles"
Styles P "Araab Styles" (eOne)
Raafi Rivero, director | Andrew Kelley, producer | The Color Machine, production co | Daniel Coda, editor
