Director Alex Southam looks at the cycle of life in this homcoming clip...
Alex Southam, director: "Beyond the obvious desire to work with such an exciting and talented artist, I think the main thing that attracted me to the project was the duality of the track's strength and its fragility. The track seems deliberately ambiguous as to whether it is about a particular woman, or women generally, so I wanted to create a video which was simultaneously personal and universal, and structure it out in a seemingly neverending cycle — hence why the video is top and tailed with ostensibly the same sequence. I'm pretty sure I referenced MC Escher at somepoint to that effect.
Additionally the video is intentionally left open for debate - just to get the old left and right side of the viewers brain working! Our movement through our series of vignettes was meticulously planned out so we knew what we had to capture from our cast performance wise and in turn, how that should work with the ebb and flow of the track. Laura was an absolute pleasure to work with, one of those artists that just gets it and gave us exactly the performance we needed to knit in with our narrative. In case of ambiguity, its a 'no-cut' and not a 'one-shot'! Special praise must be given to our fantastic cast, especially Kanga our lead, who just knocked it out the park."
The camera glides like a ghost through a moment in time at a motel. There's a missing girl, a fugitive and a twist, but it's more about the technique of long tracking shots that makes this feels a bit like the sequentially interconnected multiversal masterpiece Slacker, but with everything happening nearly all at once.
The dreamy underwater sequence in the intro comes into clarity as you realize the main character in this beautiful video has fallen for a girl on the swim team. [SG]
Ever see a living room performance that totally shakes the foundations and makes you feel like you're in a concert hall? That's the premise in "Follow Baby" as what starts as a home performance gets increasingly epic.
