Blending Hip Hop, Arthouse Cinema, and Science Fiction. See the Latest Music Video Directed by Milo Blake28.08.2020

Milo Blake is a director with Papaya Films’ London branch. His latest effort is a music video shot for a rising star of the British music scene, Finn Foxell. The contemplative video flows naturally from the lo-fi mood of the single. The very concept for the video was unique, and shooting it on analog film only intensified its nostalgia-tinted slant.

“So I am a fan of the work of Lars von Trier and after watching his film Melancholia I began doing research on rogue planets that drift through the solar system without being tethered to anything,” says the director, Milo Blake. 

It was this fascination that prompted him to go with a somewhat eschatological concept for the video. This apocalyptic angle, however, is revealed only as the video draws to a close. “The twist was to fuse this theme with the street culture imagery of London. I wanted the results to provide something that was both recognisable as a London Hip-Hop video but something that also pushed itself into more daring and unusual territory,” adds the director. 

The music video was shot entirely on 16mm film. The filmmakers emphasize that the choice was dictated by the gravity of the story they were trying to tell on the screen. The story, the director added, “needed a format which had a very human quality to it such as film. In addition to that I made it a priority to have a very wide angle lens, a 4mm so that we could get these otherworldly perspectives on our cast and the world itself. I wanted the environment and particularly the sky to be quite prominent in the frame and give us a scale that matched the scale of the concept.“ 

The director also encourages the audience to pay attention to little hints sprinkled throughout the video, like the glowing marks on the forearms of the characters. “They were my way of hinting to the finale of the video, i envisioned this movement of two sides of two different planets cut in half as a mystical tattoo placed on our actor's forearm, as he brings together halves to make a whole in one of our scenes, this is a reflection of the impending collision between the earth and our rogue planet.”